The Mets said the cause was cardiac arrest.

He is the fourth member of the Mets’ 1969 World Series championship team — the “Miracle Mets,” as they were called — to die this year, following Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Jim McAndrew.

The Mets were nearly halfway to a 40-120 record in 1962, their first season as a National League franchise, when they signed Kranepool for a bonus of $80,000. A tall, left-handed batter, he had just broken Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg’s single-season home run record at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Ed was 17 and living at home.

Kranepool brought a jolt of youthful promise to a team managed by Casey Stengel, the wizened former New York Yankees skipper, and stocked with mediocrities, castoffs, players past their primes and the inaccurately nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

When Stengel assessed Kranepool’s talent, he told The New York Times: “He don’t strike out too much and he don’t let himself get suckered into goin’ for bad pitches. I wouldn’t be afraid to play him. He don’t embarrass you.”

After playing briefly for the Mets at the end of the 1962 season, Kranepool struggled against major league pitching during the next two seasons. When he faltered in 1963, one fan raised a banner that asked, “Is Ed Kranepool Over the Hill?”

He was 18.

He was soon sent to the Mets’ top minor league team in Buffalo, New York, for parts of the 1963 and 1964 seasons.

And in 1970, when a batting average of .118 led to another demotion, Times columnist Robert Lipsyte wrote, “Kranepool was the last player linked to the bad old days, and it might have been more than symbolic that the Mets rose into first place the day after he was cut loose, like a balloon freed of ballast.”

He was promoted about six weeks later, played sparingly and wound up hitting .170. And the Mets faded to third place.

But the next season was one of Kranepool’s best — he hit 14 home runs, drove in a career-high 58 runs and batted .280.

Nicknamed “Steady Eddie, ” Kranepool inspired fans to chant “Ed-die! Ed-die!” He was selected to the 1965 National League All-Star team, though he didn’t play. In the 1969 World Series, he hit a home run as the Mets rolled to the championship in five games over the favored Baltimore Orioles.

After the ’69 Series, Kranepool and several teammates, including Tom Seaver and Cleon Jones, put together a musical act that performed in Las Vegas, singing, among other songs, “The Impossible Dream.” After the group’s debut on the Circus Maximus stage at Caesars Palace, Kranepool conceded that the singing Mets were nervous.

“It’s not like Shea Stadium, where we know what we’re doing,” he told the Times. “But we had enough Scotch.”

Edward Emil Kranepool III was born in New York City’s Bronx borough on Nov. 8, 1944, less than four months after his father, Edward Jr., an Army sergeant, was killed in battle in Saint-Lô, France, during World War II. His mother, Ethel (Hasselbach) Kranepool, raised her son and her daughter, Marilyn, on a military pension and earnings from various jobs.

Ethel Kranepool told The Daily News in 1963 that it had been difficult to be a single parent. “With Edward it was always a case of slapping him on the backside with one hand and handing him an ice cream cone with the other,” she said.

Ed Kranepool swung a toy bat at age 3, then played baseball in local playgrounds and sandlots. By high school, he stood 6-foot-3 and was launching long drives at James Monroe’s home field toward a large oak in right center field that came to be known as “Eddie’s Tree.”

He played for the Monroe team that lost, 6-5, to Curtis High School of Staten Island in the Public Schools Athletic League title game in 1962. Around graduation time, he tried out for the Mets at the Polo Grounds, the former home of the New York Giants and the Mets’ temporary home before Shea Stadium opened in 1964. He impressed the team by hitting nine balls into the stands.

That flash of teenage muscle helped give rise to the improbable notion that the Mets might have signed another great left-handed-hitting first baseman, like Mel Ott of the Giants or Lou Gehrig of the Yankees.

But Kranepool never became a superstar. Rather, he was a line-drive hitter with modest power — he never had more than 16 home runs in a season — who turned into an elite pinch-hitter as his time as a first baseman and outfielder diminished.

When the Mets returned to the World Series in 1973, facing the Oakland A’s, Kranepool went hitless in three plate appearances. The Mets lost in seven games.

From 1974 to 1978, he came off the bench to hit .396 as a pinch-hitter. In 1978, he had 15 hits in 50 at bats in that reserve role, including three home runs.

When he retired after the 1979 season, Kranepool held several Mets career records, all but two of which have been surpassed: the most pinch hits, 90, and most games played, 1,853

Kranepool admitted to regrets that he had spent too little time being nurtured in the minor leagues and that he had played for a team so desperate for fresh talent. “If I could have seen ahead in 1962, I would have signed with another club,” he told the Times as the Mets were heading to the World Series in 1969. “It was a lot of fun playing in the majors, but a lot of frustrations, too.”

He is survived by his wife, Monica (Bronner) Kranepool; his daughter, Jamie Pastrano; his sons, Keith Kranepool and Darren Todfield; seven grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Ternay.

During his playing career, Kranepool was a stockbroker and, with his teammate the outfielder Ron Swoboda, an owner of The Dugout, a restaurant in Amityville, New York, on Long Island. When he heard in 1979, during his final season, that the Mets might be for sale, he said, he assembled a group to purchase the franchise. But it was acquired by a group led by Fred Wilpon and Doubleday & Co., the publishing house. The Wilpon family later became the team’s majority owner and ultimately sold the Mets to the current owners, Steve and Alex Cohen, in 2020.

In about 2011, with Wilpon and his family facing financial pressure following losses from their involvement with fraudster Bernard L. Madoff, they sought investors to buy minority stakes in the club. At a team dinner, a Mets spokesperson recalled, Kranepool talked to Jeff Wilpon, the club’s chief operating officer and one of Wilpon’s sons, about the sales of the shares.

“I don’t want shares,” the spokesperson quoted Kranepool as saying. “I want to buy the whole team so I can run it better than you and your father.”

The encounter caused a rift that ended seven years later with a call from Jeff Wilpon that led to Kranepool’s throwing out the first pitch before a game in 2018.

“I was on the outside looking in,” Kranepool told the Times, “and I’m glad I’m not anymore.”

In 2017, after announcing that both his kidneys were failing, Kranepool auctioned his 1969 Mets world championship ring for $62,475 to defray medical expenses. After undergoing transplant surgery nearly two years later, he learned who his donor was: a Mets fan.

A few months after the surgery, he helped the Mets celebrate the 50th anniversary of their World Series victory. Speaking at Citi Field during the ceremony, he encouraged the team, then near the bottom of the National League East, to turn their season around.

“They can do it, like we did — you got to believe in yourself,” he said. “Good luck. You have half a season. I wish you the best so that we can celebrate in October.”

The team did rally, finishing third in the division, but there was no 50th-anniversary miracle. The Mets didn’t make the playoffs.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The S&P 500 fell 2.3% on Wednesday, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 3.6%, the biggest drop for both since 2022.

Investors were expecting perfection from the tech giants’ earnings reports, said Daniel Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities. The sell-off indicates that investors are disappointed by the reports, but their response amounts to nothing more than “a blip in the radar,” as tech companies are poised to be bolstered by the artificial intelligence boom, Ives added.

“Investors are negatively reacting to any whiff of softness that we see from these big tech players,” he said. “I think it’s an overreaction after a massive run in tech stocks.”

Here’s what to know about the trading.

— Tesla fell more than 12% on Wednesday, after the company Tuesday reported a 45% drop in profit in the quarter ending in June, a result of the electric car company’s sluggish sales. Tesla’s current operating profit margin, a measure of how much money it makes on every dollar of revenue, was 6.3%, down from 9.6% in the same period a year ago. Investors are waiting to see if Tesla, with Elon Musk at the helm, can find new ways to generate revenue.

— Even though Alphabet reported Tuesday that it beat earnings and revenue expectations, shares of the company fell more than 5% on Wednesday. Advertising sales at YouTube, which is owned by Google, climbed 13% to $8.7 billion, missing the $8.9 billion figure expected by analysts. Investors are likely to be concerned about whether Alphabet can widen its margins in the coming months.

— Shares of other big tech companies also fell. Nvidia shares dropped 6.8%, while Meta’s stock was down 5.6%. “The scale of market move today demonstrates what investors have been talking about for quarters: that increasing market concentration in a handful of companies creates a risk in itself for holders of the major equity indices,” Lauren Goodwin, an economist at New York Life Investments, said in an emailed statement.

— There has also been a broader shift among investors away from tech and toward smaller stocks, as macroeconomic dynamics appear increasingly favorable to smaller companies’ shares. Consumer price index data released this month showed a further cooldown in inflation, solidifying investors’ expectations that the Federal Reserve will start to cut interest rates in September. The potential for lower interest rates could catalyze a shift to investment in small and medium-sized companies, Ido Caspi, a research analyst at Global X, said in a statement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The New York Times

Daniel P. Jordan, who as president of the foundation that owns Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia, broadened its educational mission — and, perhaps most significant, commissioned a study that found that Jefferson had almost certainly fathered six children with Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of people he enslaved — died March 21 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 85.

His daughter Katherine Jordan said the cause was a heart attack.

Questions about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings had circulated among historians, and her family, for two centuries. In 1993, when Jordan invited some of her descendants to a Jefferson commemorative event at Monticello, he was noncommittal on the paternity issue. “If there’s anything like a party line, it’s simply this,” he told The Washington Post. “We cannot prove it, we can’t disprove it.”

But five years later, his position had to evolve. The results of DNA testing, published in the Nov. 5, 1998, issue of Nature magazine, appeared to confirm that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, one of Sally Hemings’ sons. The tests strongly indicated that Eston had the same Y chromosome mutations seen in the Jefferson lineage.

At a news conference, Jordan said the tests would be evaluated by a research committee at Monticello, which is owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

In early 2000, the Monticello study validated the DNA findings. But the study went further with its analysis, examining historical and scientific documents and conducting interviews with descendants of people who had been enslaved at Monticello.

“Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty,” Jordan said at a news conference, “our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one and, perhaps, all of the known children of Sally Hemings.”

He added, “Whether it was love or lust, rape or romance, no one knows, and it’s unlikely that anyone will ever know.”

Daniel Porter Jordan Jr. was born July 22, 1938, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. His father was a dentist, and his mother, Mildred (Dobbs) Jordan, managed the house. At the University of Mississippi, where he played both baseball and basketball, Jordan studied history and English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1960.

He met Lewellyn Schmelzer, known as Lou, at the university. They married in 1961.

After receiving his master’s degree in history from the university in 1962, Jordan served as an Army infantryman in South Korea and Western Europe and taught history to enlisted men on Army bases through a division of the University of Maryland.

Back home, he resumed his education at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded. He received a fellowship from the Jefferson foundation for his studies, and Merrill Peterson, a Jefferson scholar, was his doctoral adviser. He received a doctorate in history in 1970.

Over the next 14 years, he taught history at the University of Richmond and at Virginia Commonwealth University, also in Richmond, where he became chair of the history department. In 1983 he published a book, “Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia.”

When he was named the foundation’s executive director in early 1985, Jordan said his goal was to expand its educational mission. He was elevated to president nine years later.

“We’re in the business of telling people about Thomas Jefferson, of educating them in the best sense,” he told The Daily Progress of Charlottesville in 1994. “It’s great if they know Jefferson was author of the Declaration of Independence, but those facts are secondary to his values and ideas.”

During Jordan’s 23 years at Monticello, publication of Jefferson’s post-presidency letters and other papers began; the Jefferson Library opened near Monticello, on the campus of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies; descendants of Monticello’s enslaved people began being interviewed for an oral history project called Getting Word; and the Center for Historic Plants was established to collect and sell plants and seeds grown at Monticello, in addition to other historic and heirloom seeds.

“He was interested in the restoration of the gardens,” Peter Hatch, the former director of gardens and grounds at Monticello, who started the plant center, said by phone. “He wasn’t a keen fan of horticulture, but he understood the importance of landscaping when you talked about Jefferson.”

In addition, the plantation’s property was augmented with the acquisition of nearby Montalto mountain for $15 million; the main house’s leaky roof was rebuilt; and the estate’s vineyard was restored. In 2001, archaeologists identified a slave burial ground about 2,000 feet from Monticello itself.

“It has been a long-standing goal here at Monticello to determine where slaves were buried, and we believe we have now found one such location,” Jordan told The Associated Press. “We regard this as a significant archaeological find, one that allows us to fill in one more piece of the puzzle in our efforts to research and understand all aspects of the Monticello plantation.”

Before Jordan arrived, “it was a mom-and-pop place,” said Susan Stein, the Richard Gilder senior curator of special projects at Monticello. “There were serious scholars here, but Dan elevated them, and me, and he really re-imagined the place. He envisioned it as a university. That made all the difference.”

After he retired in 2008, Jordan worked as a consultant for clients including people who managed historic homes like Monticello and other nonprofit organizations.

In addition to daughter Katherine, Jordan is survived by his wife; another daughter, Grace Jordan; a son, Daniel III; six grandchildren; and a brother, Joseph.

Among the relatives of Kennedy expected to back Biden are his siblings Joseph, Kerry, Rory, Kathleen, Maxwell and Christopher. The Biden campaign released a list of 15 Kennedys set to appear at the rally, but it said other family members would endorse the president as well. Kerry Kennedy will introduce Biden at the rally, the campaign said, and Joe Kennedy III, Robert Kennedy’s nephew and a former Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts, will do so at a second event.

The show of force will send the clearest signal yet that America’s most storied Democratic family is deeply fearful that one of its own could tip the 2024 election to former President Donald Trump, and hopes to use its influence to try to stop him.

Many family members have previously expressed strong disapproval of Kennedy’s candidacy, voicing anguish about his promotion of conspiracy theories and confusion about why he is challenging a Democratic president they admire. Like many Democrats, they worry that he could help Trump win if he draws even a small number of votes away from Biden in the battleground states — contests that were decided by tens of thousands of votes in 2020.

Trump is likely to remain the main target of attacks at the Philadelphia event, but the symbolic repudiation of Kennedy will not be subtle.

“We can say today, with no less urgency, that our rights and freedoms are once again in peril,” Kerry Kennedy is expected to say, according to excerpts from her speech shared by the Biden campaign. “That is why we all need to come together in a campaign that should unite not only Democrats, but all Americans, including Republicans, and independents, who believe in what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

The family has telegraphed its intentions: Last month, members visited Biden at the White House for St. Patrick’s Day, sharing a photo of him with a large group of them. “From one proud Irish family to another — it was good to have you all back at the White House,” Biden wrote on social media.

Members of the Kennedy family also denounced an ad that a super political action committee supporting Kennedy ran during the Super Bowl. The ad closely resembled a spot supporting John F. Kennedy, his uncle, during his 1960 bid for the White House.

With the election months away, and Kennedy still pursuing access to the ballot in many states, it’s hard to know whether he would draw more votes from Trump or Biden’s camp. But polls suggest that Trump’s base of support is much more fixed than Biden’s, meaning it’s possible that some of the president’s voters could be open to an alternative.

The Democratic Party has put together a team of lawyers aimed at tracking Kennedy’s threat, especially in battleground states. The group will also seek to counter other potential spoilers such as Cornel West, a progressive academic seeking the presidency, and the Green Party.

Democrats have already watched the collapse of one third-party effort they had nervously eyed: The centrist group No Labels, after seeking to set up a moderate politician with national recognition as an alternative to Biden and Trump, announced this month that it would abandon its attempt.

Kennedy holds a smorgasbord of policy positions not easily categorized by ideology. He has expressed liberal views on abortion, the environment and income inequality, but has also promoted false theories about the safety of vaccines and pushed arguments that are more common on the right.

This month, he questioned the Justice Department’s effort to prosecute those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, downplaying the severity of the attack. His campaign also fired a consultant who had suggested that supporting Kennedy would help Trump defeat Biden.

Still, Trump has signaled that he, too, sees Kennedy as potentially attracting voters away from his campaign. He posted on social media last month that Kennedy was more “radical Left” than Biden, casting him as a liberal Democrat in disguise. Yet Trump has also privately expressed intrigue with the idea of choosing Kennedy as his running mate — a notion that those close to him consider unrealistic and that Kennedy himself rejected.

Biden’s rally in Philadelphia is the final major stop in a three-day swing through Pennsylvania. During the trip, he laid out his economic and tax agenda, repeatedly attacking Trump as wealthy, out of touch and an enemy of working people.

Members of the Kennedy family who appear at the rally are expected to invoke Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy’s father.

“I can only imagine how Donald Trump’s outrageous lies and behavior would have horrified my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who proudly served as attorney general of the United States, and honored his pledge to uphold the law and protect the country,” Kerry Kennedy will say, according to her prepared remarks. “Daddy stood for equal justice, human rights and freedom from want and fear. Just as President Biden does today.”

After Biden speaks, Kennedy family members will make calls to voters and knock on doors, the Biden campaign said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, is to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can.

The covert operation is now heightening concerns that Iran is seeking to turn the West Bank into the next flashpoint in the long-simmering shadow war between Israel and Iran. That conflict has taken on new urgency this month, risking a broader conflict in the Middle East, as Iran vowed to retaliate for an Israeli strike on an embassy compound that killed seven Iranian armed forces commanders.

Many weapons smuggled to the West Bank largely travel along two paths from Iran through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the officials said. As the arms cross borders, the officials added, they change hands among a multinational cast that can include members of organized criminal gangs, extremist militants, soldiers and intelligence operatives. A key group in the operation, the Iranian officials and analysts said, are Bedouin smugglers who carry the weapons across the border from Jordan into Israel.

The New York Times interviewed senior security and government officials with knowledge of Iran’s effort to smuggle weapons to the West Bank, including three from Israel, three from Iran and three from the United States. The officials from all three countries requested anonymity to discuss covert operations for which they were not authorized to speak publicly.

“The Iranians wanted to flood the West Bank with weapons, and they were using criminal networks in Jordan, in the West Bank and in Israel, primarily Bedouin, to move and sell the products,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization, and the author of a study on the smuggling route.

The smuggling to the West Bank, analysts said, began about two years ago when Iran started using routes previously established to smuggle other contraband. It is unclear exactly how many weapons have made it to the territory in that time, though analysts say the majority are small arms.

In the months since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip, Israeli security forces have conducted a large-scale crackdown across the West Bank.

The Israeli military describes the raids as part of its counterterrorism effort against Hamas and other armed factions to root out weapons and militants. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, including those accused of attacking Israelis, according to the United Nations, in one of the deadliest periods in decades.

Human rights groups say many Palestinians are being unfairly detained, particularly those held in Israeli prisons without a formal trial. They say that it is unclear how many of the detainees possess genuine militant links.

“These arrests include many who are being swept up for reasons that are not clear,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli government has a long track record of abusive detention, arbitrary arrests and detaining people for exercising their basic rights.”

For years, Iran’s leaders have declared the necessity of arming Palestinian fighters in the occupied West Bank. Iran has long supplied weapons for attacking Israel to militants elsewhere in the region, members of its so-called Axis of Resistance, including its two primary Palestinian allies in Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Both of those groups, which also operate in the West Bank, are designated terrorist organizations by the United States, the European Union, Israel and other countries.

The Iranian officials said Iran had not singled out a particular group for its largesse, choosing instead to broadly inundate the territory with guns and ammunition.

Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on Iran’s military, said Iran was focusing on the West Bank because it understood that access to Gaza would be curtailed for the foreseeable future.

“The West Bank really needs to be the next frontier that Iran will penetrate and proliferate weapons into, because if they are able to do that then the West Bank will become just as big a problem, if not bigger, as Gaza,” he said.

Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the Palestinian Authority and with it much of the West Bank, accused Iran last week of trying to “exploit” Palestinians for its own means by spreading chaos in the territory. In a statement, Fatah said it would not allow “our sacred cause and the blood of our people to be exploited” by Iran.

In a statement, Iran’s U.N. Mission did not comment on the smuggling operation, but emphasized what it said was the importance of Palestinians taking up arms against Israel.

“Iran’s assessment posits that the sole effective avenue for resisting the occupation by the Zionist regime is through armed resistance,” said Amir Saeid Iravani, the country’s U.N. ambassador. “Palestinian resistance forces possess the capability to manufacture and procure the necessary armaments for their cause.”

Even after Oct. 7, as Iran’s proxies have increasingly launched salvos from Lebanon and Yemen, Iran and Israel preferred to restrict much of their conflict to the shadows. But that covert war exploded into public view last week with the airstrike against an Iranian Embassy building in Syria.

Israeli warplanes on April 1 attacked a meeting of leaders from Iran’s armed forces and members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Damascus, the Iranian officials said. Among those killed was Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, 65, the Revolutionary Guard general in charge of Iran’s covert operations in Syria and Lebanon through which parts of the weapons smuggling trail wends, the Israeli, Iranian and American officials said.

That attack came on the heels of another Israeli airstrike. On March 26, Israeli forces struck a key node of the smuggling route in eastern Syria, according to the American and Iranian officials, and two of the Israeli officials.

The majority of the smuggled weapons, analysts said, are small arms such as handguns and assault rifles. Iran is also smuggling advanced weapons, according to the American and Israeli officials. Those weapons, the Israeli officials said, include anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, which fly fast and low to the ground, creating a challenge for Israel when defending civilian and military targets from close-range fire.

Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, said in a statement that it had recently seized advanced military equipment smuggled into the West Bank. The statement added that Shin Bet “takes very seriously involvement in activities directed by Iran and its affiliates and will continue to carry out active measures at all times to monitor and thwart any activity that endangers the security of the state of Israel.”

Working with its militant allies and established criminal networks, Iran is using two main routes to get weapons to the West Bank, the Israeli, Iranian and American officials said.

Along one route, Iran-backed militants and Iranian operatives carry the weapons from Syria to Jordan, the officials said. From there, the Iranian officials added, they are transferred at the border to Bedouin smugglers. The nomads take the weapons to the border with Israel, where they are picked up by criminal gangs who then move them to the West Bank.

The Iranian effort taps a well-established smuggling route in Jordan, which shares a porous 300-mile border with Israel. Last year, a Jordanian lawmaker was indicted in Amman, Jordan, after being caught in 2022 trying to smuggle more than 200 weapons into the West Bank. The source of the weapons is unclear.

One of the Iranian officials said increased security since Oct. 7, by both Israel and Jordan, has raised the risk of getting caught, especially for Bedouins and Arab Israelis who play critical roles for their ability to cross borders.

A second, more challenging route skips Jordan and takes the weapons from Syria to Lebanon, two of the U.S. officials said. From there, many of the weapons are smuggled into Israel, where criminal gangs pick them up and move them to the West Bank.

The route through Lebanon, Levitt said, is more difficult, particularly since the war in Gaza started, because the border on which Hezbollah operates is more heavily patrolled by both the Israeli military and U.N. peacekeepers.

Much of the work coordinating the smuggling route is done by Iranian operatives from the Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guard’s external intelligence agency, according to two of the Iranian officials who are affiliated with the Guard.

In addition to killing Zahedi, the Israeli strike against the Iranian Embassy building in Damascus last week killed two other Quds Force generals and four other officers, Iran said, making it one of the deadliest attacks of the shadow war.

The American officials and two of the Israeli officials said a series of strikes in Syria a week earlier were aimed at two Iranian intelligence divisions involved in the smuggling. One unit, known as Division 4000, is overseen directly by the Revolutionary Guard. The other, Division 18840, is operated by the Quds Force.

Days before the Israeli strike on the embassy building in Damascus, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave his personal seal of approval to the Palestinian militants who receive many of Iran’s weapons. In Tehran, Iran, he met with the leaders of two armed groups: Ziad al-Nakhalah of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas.

Khamenei, who years ago publicly issued an order to arm the West Bank, told both leaders, according to the state media, that Iran would not hesitate to support Palestinians and their cause.

“It would not have been easy for the Palestinian people to withstand this battle had it not been for Iran’s continuous and consistent support at all political, military and security levels,” al-Nakhalah said in a speech in Tehran.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The appearance came after the pope decided to reduce his participation in two major Holy Week events, seemingly at the last minute.

Those decisions seemed to represent a new phase in a more than 11-year papacy throughout which Francis has made the acceptance of the limits that challenge and shape humanity a constant theme. Now, he seems to have entered a period in which he is himself scaling back to observe, and highlight, the limits imposed by his own health constraints and to conserve strength for the most critical moments.

On Sunday after the Mass, Francis took a prolonged spin in his popemobile around St. Peter’s Square before ascending to a balcony overlooking it to deliver his traditional Easter message.

“Let us not allow the strengthening winds of war to blow on Europe and the Mediterranean,” he said to the tens of thousands of faithful, dignitaries, Swiss Guards and clergy.

Referring to the stone that had blocked the tomb of Jesus before his resurrection, which Easter celebrates, Francis said that “today, too, great stones, heavy stones, block the hopes of humanity.”

“The stone of war, the stone of humanitarian crises, the stone of human rights violations, the stone of human trafficking and other stones as well,” he said.

The address was a compendium of Francis’ priorities, including the need to ease the suffering of people affected by war, natural disasters and famine in parts of the world he has visited. He addressed the plight of migrants, prayed for “consolation and hope” for the poor, and spoke against human trafficking and arms dealing.

Holy Week is one of the most demanding and significant on the Christian calendar, and Francis has been dogged all winter by what the Vatican has called the flu, bronchitis and coldlike symptoms. His doctor told the Italian news media Saturday that Francis was in good shape for his age, but that flu season was difficult for him.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Tel Aviv has been the scene of weekly demonstrations calling on the government to strike a cease-fire deal to free the hostages who have been held in the Gaza Strip since October. Those protests have been growing in size as the war has dragged on and anger at Netanyahu’s government has mounted.

On Saturday night, the sounds of whistles, horns and drums filled the air along with chants from the crowds, video from The Associated Press showed. Protesters waved flags and carried pictures of the Israeli hostages with signs reading “Hostage deal now.” Other banners made clear the anger directed at Netanyahu over the plight of the hostages, with one reading “Replace him, save them.”

“We demand our government to sign a deal now, no matter what is the cost,” Lee Hoffmann Agiv, who attended the protest, told the AP. “It’s a life or death situation — we will not forgive our government if another hostage dies in captivity.”

As the night wore on, some scuffles broke out. Police said that while the demonstration was largely peaceful, “several hundred protesters” had violated public order by lighting bonfires, blocking a highway and confronting the police. Officers used a water cannon to disperse some protesters from a highway and made 16 arrests, according to the police.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

“For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport,” Winfrey said in the show, titled “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.”

Shame has become a focal point in that conversation as new drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro, which are widely used for weight loss, shift how people think about treating obesity. When Winfrey disclosed in December that she was taking a medication to manage her weight, she said she was “done with the shaming” that had followed her through decades of dieting.

Many patients who start taking these medications say they have felt shamed for struggling with their weight, and then shamed for taking weight loss drugs, said Dr. Michelle Hauser, the obesity medicine director of the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center, who was not involved with the special.

“People just are constantly getting this message, both internal bias and then external bias from other people,” she said. Some might think, “‘I shouldn’t have to rely on medication, I shouldn’t be dependent on them,’” she added.

Hauser tells patients to instead ask themselves: “Would you tell someone that about their blood pressure medication?”

Winfrey did not name the medication she took, but said that after she started the drug, she understood for the first time that “all these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower, and they were for some reason stronger than me.”

Winfrey and others interviewed on the program — which included doctors who have consulted for the makers of these drugs — referred throughout the hour to the incessant internal chatter that some people experience around eating, also called “food noise.” Many patients who have taken drugs like Ozempic have said that noise fades away on medication.

“I felt like I was freed,” said Amy Kane, who joined Winfrey onstage to discuss losing 160 pounds on Mounjaro.

The drugs, however, have notable side effects: One of the patients Winfrey spoke with said that she stopped taking a weight loss medication after she vomited blood and landed in the emergency room.

Dr. Amanda Velazquez, an obesity expert at Cedars-Sinai and one of the doctors who has consulted for a weight loss drugmaker, said in the special that she considered the side effects “overhyped.” Outside experts have said that the drugs can lead to nausea, dizziness, constipation, diarrhea, acid reflux and in severe cases, malnutrition if a person consumes too few nutrients.

Many patients have also struggled to access the medications, some of which are used to treat diabetes in addition to obesity. Some insurers do not cover the drugs for weight loss, and drugmakers have also faced difficulties keeping up with demand. Nearly all doses of Wegovy are currently in short supply, according to a Food and Drug Administration database.

Winfrey, who said shortly before announcing her special that she would not seek reelection for her position on the board of Weight Watchers, has long been public about her efforts to lose weight. In 1988, she tugged a red wagon filled with fat across the stage of her television show, a symbol for the 67 pounds she had lost while on a liquid diet. The day after that episode, she started gaining weight back, Winfrey said in the new special. At one point during the program, she pointed to an image of the cover of TV Guide from 1990 that labeled her as “bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy.”

“She’s been subject to so much policing, so much surveillance, so much scrutiny about her body,” said Kate Manne, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University and author of the book “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.”

“After a lifetime of people speculating about her weight and often jeering at her weight when she gained it, and applauding her for losing weight, I can really sympathize with her sense that her body is a problem that needs to be solved,” Manne said. But she said she was concerned about the potential harms of conversations focused so squarely on weight loss.

“I feel worried that she will be again perpetuating a social sense that people’s variations in size and shape really need to be addressed as a medical problem,” Manne said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation before the U.S. presidential election in November.

Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed furtive Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools had “made this even easier to do and to make the content that they do even more targeted.”

The Miami Chronicle’s website first appeared Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered “the Florida News since 1937.”

Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in U.S. support for Russia’s beleaguered opposition after the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.

The campaign, the experts and officials say, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, interfered in the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against Russia’s military, but the continuation of his operations underscores the importance the Kremlin places on its information battles around the world. It is not clear who exactly has taken the helm.

“Putin would be a complete and utter idiot to let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever before.”

The researchers at Clemson disclosed the Russian connections behind the D.C. Weekly website in a report in December. After their disclosure, Russian narratives began appearing on another site that had been created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.

The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose name clearly is meant to evoke the city’s storied Daily News tabloid, were both created Jan. 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which monitors domains.

All the outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and, as a result, have similar designs.

The outlets have logos and names that evoke a bygone era of American journalism, an effort to create a semblance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle did operate from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to struggling newspapers today: It was not profitable.

They also update regularly with major breaking news, creating at first glance the impression of topicality. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling about Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s site within hours of the decision.

In other ways, the websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. The “about” page for the Miami Chronicle, for example, is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites post working contact information.)

The purpose is not to fool a discerning reader into diving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Linvill said. The goal instead is to lend an aura of credibility to posts on social media spreading the disinformation.

The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used before: laundering claims that first appear online through lesser news organizations. Those reports spread again online and appear in still more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.

“The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they’re reading a genuine, U.S.-branded article,” Linvill said.

D.C. Weekly published a number of Kremlin narratives beginning in August, according to Clemson’s study. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bought more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry at the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.

The site claims to have a staff of 17 journalists, but they seem to have been fabricated. The biography of that story’s author, called Jessica Devlin, used as a profile picture a photograph of Judy Batalion, the author of a bestselling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or the author until fact checkers reached out to her.

Other articles that appear on the sites appear to have been lifted from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from Russian state media’s English-language news agencies, like RT. Some stories have carelessly included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Linvill and Warren wrote in the study.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

The New York News Daily published a story recently about supposed American plans to interfere in Russia’s election this month, whose winner, Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was spread on social media by people who have long had links with the Kremlin’s state media apparatus.

Another article last week appeared to come from a fictional character on X, formerly Twitter. The New York News Daily posted an article about what purported to be a thread announcing a $115 million Hollywood blockbuster about Zelenskyy. The user on X was called Brian Wilson and was described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.

The account has posted on X only 85 times, the vast majority of them reposts about movies over two days in February. A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to produce a biopic of Zelenskyy — “The Price of Victory” — in a series of posts. Those were followed last week by two more that featured actual videos of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren manipulated to appear to be wishing him success with the film.

The videos appear to have originated with Cameo, the celebrity greeting app, which figured in an earlier Russian campaign that Microsoft disclosed in December.

A spokesperson for Paramount Pictures said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesperson for Cameo said Monday that the company was not aware of the videos but added, “As a general rule, when posts misusing Cameo-sourced content are brought to our attention, we request their removal from the platform at issue.” Later that day, the two videos were blocked on the X account for violating intellectual property rights. X later suspended the account.

Posts about the film spread extensively on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as the source and said it underscored an abuse of Western financial assistance in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The narrative was also amplified by outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence agencies, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

The articles typically get hundreds of posts on a variety of platforms, including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, though it is difficult to measure the exact reach. Taken together, they could in theory reach thousands of readers, even millions.

“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we will see in the election cycle,” Linvill said. “It’s cheap, highly targeted and obviously effective.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The $460 billion legislation would fund a slew of government agencies and programs, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs. It must pass in order to avert a partial government shutdown at the end of the week.

Top lawmakers are still negotiating spending for the other half of the government for the rest of the year, including for the Pentagon, that Congress must pass by March 22 to avert a lapse in funding for those programs.

Here is what to know about the 1,050-page bill on track for passage this week.

Republicans failed to win any major policy changes.

The funding levels adhere to the debt limit and spending deal negotiated last year by President Joe Biden and the speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, keeping spending on domestic programs essentially flat — even as funding for veterans’ programs continues to grow — while allowing military spending to increase slightly.

Ultimately, lawmakers jettisoned most of House Republicans’ most sweeping and divisive demands, including blocking an increase in funding for nutrition assistance programs for low-income women and children, and halting the implementation of new rules to allow greater access to abortion medication.

But Speaker Mike Johnson and his negotiators were able to secure a number of smaller demands, including cuts to the EPA and the FBI.

The bill would increase nutrition funding for low-income women and children.

Republicans opposed a bid by Democrats to increase funding for the nutrition program known as WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children, but Democrats secured $7.03 billion for the program — more than $1 billion greater than what Biden had initially requested — saying the additional money was necessary to keep up with rising needs.

Democrats also fended off an effort led by a top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee and member of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, to start a pilot program in several states to restrict what low-income recipients could purchase with government help through the food nutrition program known as SNAP, limiting them to “nutrient dense” foods.

Republicans won cuts to the EPA, the FBI and the ATF.

Negotiators agreed to cut funding for the EPA by nearly 10%, however the real reduction is only about 4% because of a change in how the Superfund program, which is responsible for cleaning up contaminated land and responding to environmental emergencies such as oil spills, is paid for.

The spending bill includes deep cuts to the Superfund program, but Biden has signed legislation, including the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the landmark health, climate and tax law, that created new tax revenue to finance it.

The FBI, a frequent target of Republicans who claim that law enforcement has been weaponized against the right, would receive a 6% cut in funding — most of it targeting the bureau’s budget for the construction of a new building. Funding for FBI salaries would also decrease slightly.

Republicans also insisted on the inclusion of a measure prohibiting the Justice Department from targeting or investigating “parents who peacefully protest at school board meetings and are not suspected of engaging in unlawful activity.” Conservatives were outraged when the department in 2021 began tracking threats against school administrators, teachers and board members amid heated and occasionally violent clashes over issues like mask requirements.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — which Republicans criticize for regulating guns too tightly — would also see a 7% cut, while funding for the Drug Enforcement Administration would increase slightly.

Republicans won a provision making it easier for veterans deemed mentally incompetent to buy a gun.

Republicans used the spending legislation to target a policy instituted by the Department of Veterans Affairs that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging to a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances. Under language the GOP insisted on, the VA could not do so without a court order. Republicans contended that the current practice relies on an overly broad definition of incompetence and could infringe upon veterans’ Second Amendment rights.

GOP measures to restrict abortion access did not make the final cut.

House Republicans had loaded up their spending bills with provisions aimed at restricting abortion access.

In one case last fall, more moderate GOP lawmakers helped to sink a spending bill that prevented money from being spent to enforce a District of Columbia law that protects employees from being discriminated against for seeking contraception or abortion services.

Republicans also sought to defund a new rule by the Food and Drug Administration allowing mifepristone — the first pill used in a two-drug medication abortion regimen — to be distributed through the mail and at retail locations.

None of those measures made it into the first spending package.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.