The United States is among many countries that allow the chemical compound to be sold as a food preservative, and the federal Food and Drug Administration regulates its use for that purpose.
There is no systematic tracking of suicides involving the compound, but The Times identified dozens of people who had used it since 2018 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australia. More than 300 members of the suicide website had announced intentions to use the compound to kill themselves.
A study of 47 cases of poisoning by the preservative reported to the National Poison Data System over a five-year period found that suicide attempts with it had been increasing since 2017. A 2020 article in The Journal of Emergency Medicine warned that because the compound “is readily accessible through online vendors, and is being circulated through various suicide forums,” emergency rooms might see more patients who have used it.
Dr. Kyle Pires, a resident emergency room physician at Yale University Hospital who treated a 28-year-old woman who had bought the compound on Amazon, wrote in the journal Clinical Toxicology about her death and the recent rise in suicides by this method. The article, published last May, said policymakers should be aware of the preservative’s use in suicides, and encouraged emergency rooms to stock doses of an antidote, methylene blue, that can prevent death if administered early.
In an interview, Dr. Pires said that businesses should be able to buy the preservative, but sales to individuals should be banned.
“There’s an argument that it’s a slippery slope to restrict sales of something that is legal just because some people are using it to kill themselves,” Dr. Pires said. But, he added, “this is a cost-benefit analysis of a small number of hobbyists using this chemical to cure meat at home versus these growing numbers of young people, including teenagers, using it to kill themselves. For me, it’s an easy calculation.”
In the United Kingdom, coroners for nearly two years have been highlighting suicides involving online purchases of the preservative and asking the government to take action. A cross-government group is working with businesses — including manufacturers and online suppliers of the preservative — to reduce access and end some sales to individuals, according to a spokeswoman for the government’s Department of Health and Social Care. The United Kingdom already requires sellers to inform law enforcement officials of any suspicious purchases of the compound, though it’s unclear how often such reports are made.
Until now, tall ships passed under the bridge before assembling their masts and taller structures, he said.
Dennis Tak, a Labor Party city councilor for Rotterdam, said he was fine with the bridge being dismantled — since the city would not be paying for it — because of the jobs the process would create. “As a city, this is a great way to take some of his money,” Mr. Tak said.
The structure is more than a bridge to the people of Rotterdam, said Siebe Thissen, the author of the book “The Boy Who Jumped From the Bridge,” about a working-class man who jumped from the bridge in 1933. “It’s a monument,” he said. “It’s the identity of Rotterdam.”
When city officials tried to take the bridge down in the 1990s since it was no longer in use, there were major protests, he said, calling the bridge a reminder of “the old days” in Rotterdam.
“I think that’s why there is so much turmoil about Jeff Bezos and his boat,” he said, before referring to accusations against Amazon. “People say, ‘Why this guy?’ It’s a working-class town, and they all know that Jeff Bezos, of course, he exploits his workers, so people say, ‘Why should this guy be able to demolish the bridge for his boat?’”
As of Thursday, more than 600 Facebook users said they would attend an event, titled “Throwing eggs at superyacht Jeff Bezos,” where they plan to gather by the bridge to throw eggs at the boat. “Rotterdammers are proud of their city and don’t tear down iconic buildings just because you are super rich,” said Pablo Strörmann, the event organizer, who said he started the Facebook group “mostly” as a joke.
Mr. le Couvreur, who works for the company Tours by Locals, which connects tourists with local guides, said that Rotterdammers would likely enjoy the international attention that the spectacle had brought, he said. “On the other hand, it shows the unimaginable wealth that people like Bezos have created for themselves, that nothing can stand in the way for them living out their dreams and hobbies,” he said, adding that the outlook was “worlds apart from those who will be watching the ship pass through the city.”
SALT LAKE CITY — Republican officials meeting in Utah advanced a watered-down resolution Thursday that would formally censure GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their perceived disloyalty to former President Donald Trump but not seek to expel them from the party.
The resolution’s passage through a subcommittee followed hours of hand-wringing over language that initially would have called on the House Republican Conference to oust Cheney and Kinzinger, the only Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The censure resolution is expected to be voted on Friday by all 168 Republican National Committee members at their winter meeting in Salt Lake City.
“We want to send a message that we’re disapproving of their conduct. It’s a middle ground,” RNC member Harmeet Dhillon said, adding that the vote was unanimous.
The effort to punish Cheney, of Wyoming, and Kinzinger, of Illinois, comes as party officials juggle preparation for this year’s midterm elections, when control of Congress and 36 governorships are at stake, with planning for the 2024 presidential election. In Salt Lake City this week, they’ve discussed where to host their 2024 party convention and whether to compel their candidates not to participate in presidential debates, a cause important to Trump.
But the last-minute change to the resolution puts in question Trump‘s overarching influence on a party apparatus that has largely acquiesced to his wishes. The former president and other GOP members were incensed when Kinzinger and Cheney agreed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to join the Democratic-led House committee investigating the insurrection, giving the panel a veneer of bipartisan credibility.
Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel did not respond to request for comment Thursday, but Dhillon said RNC resolutions are routinely revised.
Not every RNC member was supportive of the initial draft resolution for expulsion.
“It’s distracting from what should be our main objective: winning back the House and the Senate. We should be focused on taking on Democrats and not each other. This is not time well spent,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said of the effort to punish Cheney and Kinzinger.
The resolution to expel Cheney and Kinzinger was spearheaded by David Bossie, a Maryland committee member who previously served as a Trump campaign adviser, and Frank Eathorne, chair of Wyoming’s Republican Party. Eathorne declined to comment on the revised resolution after its passage.
The initial draft, obtained by The Associated Press, had accused Cheney and Kinzinger of serving as “pawns to parrot Democrat talking points” on the Jan. 6 House committee and chided them for deposing their colleagues and “pursuing what amounts to a third political impeachment of President Trump.”
“The Conference must not be sabotaged by Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger who have demonstrated, with actions and words, that they support Democrat efforts to destroy President Trump more than they support winning back a Republican majority in 2023,” it said.
The RNC has no formal power over the party’s congressional members, so how much weight a resolution to expel them from the House Republican Conference would have carried in Congress if passed is unclear.
Kinzinger said before the vote that he was unfazed by the resolution and already felt like an outcast in his party.
“I’m not gonna lose any sleep over it. Ultimately, if this does come to fruition, I think all that does is shows more about them than us. It shows that Trump and Trumpism has overtaken the RNC,” he said.
Cheney has already been censured by the Wyoming Republican Party, but the voters who will determine her fate are less conservative than party insiders. Wyoming allows voters to change party affiliation at the polls, meaning Cheney could draw enough independent and even Democratic support to prevail in the Republican primary Aug. 16.
Cheney over the past year has raised $7.2 million, ranking ninth among all U.S. House candidates, according to the Federal Election Commission. That included over $2 million over the last three months of 2021, more than four times as much as her leading primary opponent raised, and Cheney finished the year with over 10 times as much campaign money.
Cheney wouldn’t specifically answer questions about the resolution but referred to a previous statement in which she said she didn’t recognize those she felt had abandoned the U.S. Constitution in service of Trump.
“The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to ‘overturn’ a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy,” she said.
• Gruver reported from Cheyenne, Wyoming. AP National Politics Writer Steve Peoples contributed reporting from New York.
An improving economy and a persistent virus are beginning to weigh on Amazon’s retail business, even as its cloud computing business grew and an investment lifted profits.
The company, whose profits, employee count and share price swelled two years ago as Covid forced people to stay home, said on Thursday that its operating income in the fourth quarter tumbled to $3.5 billion, about half the $6.9 billion it earned in the fourth quarter of 2020.
To compensate for its increased costs, Amazon said it was raising the annual price of its Prime shipping club to $139, from $119. The company said the 17 percent hike was the first Prime increase since 2018.
“As expected over the holidays, we saw higher costs driven by labor supply shortages and inflationary pressures, and these issues persisted into the first quarter due to omicron,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a statement.
Net income, however, rose sharply owing to what Amazon called a “pretax valuation gain” in Rivian Automotive, an Amazon investment that went public in the fourth quarter. Amazon owns about 20 percent of the electric vehicle maker.
That pushed up net income to $14.3 billion compared with $7.2 billion a year ago. Without Rivian, net income would have slid to $2.5 billion, the company said. Revenue rose to a record $137.4 billion, just slightly under what analysts were expecting.
Amazon controls about 40 percent of the e-commerce market but that business — the one it began with and is still best known for — is increasingly the weakest part of the company. Online retail sales were essentially flat in the fourth quarter from 2020.
“Growth is slowing, there is no doubt,” Tom Johnson, global chief digital officer at Mindshare Worldwide, said in a note. “Comparisons against hyper growth quarters from early in the pandemic, supply chain issues that have a knock-on impact on ad spend, and continuing additional costs all add up the conclusion that the accelerated period of growth is over.”
AWS, Amazon’s cloud division, racked up its usual impressive performance, with operating income rising 49 percent. Ad revenue was $9 billion, up 37 percent. Twitter, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, has by comparison annual sales of less than $5 billion.
During regular trading Thursday, as investors fretted over what was to come, Amazon shares fell 8 percent. But after the earnings release appeared, investors focused on the good news, quickly pushing up Amazon shares in after-hours trading about 17 percent before beginning to fall back.
Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at the research firm Insider Intelligence, attributed Wall Street’s optimism to two things.
“There was the price increase for Prime membership and the continued acceleration in AWS growth and its growing impact on the bottom line,” he said. “Perhaps there’s also some forgiveness of the e-commerce deceleration given the extraordinarily challenging year-ago comparisons to Q4 2020.”
Amazon added 140,000 workers during the quarter, giving it a total of 1.6 million employees. That was up 24 percent in a year. Walmart, the largest nongovernment U.S. employer, has 2.2 million workers.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed legislation Thursday barring biological men from participating in girls’ and women’s scholastic sports, making her state the tenth to take action on transgender athletes.
Ms. Noem said at the bill-signing ceremony that Senate Bill 46 was aimed at protecting female athletes who want “to have an opportunity to go on potentially to play at a higher level, to earn scholarships, perhaps play professionally, and have a career.”
The measure, which passed overwhelmingly in the House and Senate, says: “Only female students, based on their biological sex, may participate in any team, sport, or athletic event designated as being for females, women, or girls.”
The sex determination is based on the official birth certificate issued at or near birth.
The legislation replaces similar executive orders issued by the Republican governor in March 2021 after she declined to sign a women’s sports bill over legal concerns.
LGBTQ advocates have decried such bills, saying they discriminate against transgender athletes by barring them from participating on teams that correspond with their gender identity.
Supporters of women’s sports counter that male-born competitors have an unfair physical advantage, which isn’t eliminated by the hormone-suppressing drugs involved in gender transitions.
Other states, including Indiana and Georgia, are considering similar legislation this year. Several bills passed in the last two years have been blocked by courts pending the outcome of lawsuits filed by transgender athletes.
The American Civil Liberties Union called the South Dakota bill “the first ban on trans student-athletes of the year.”
“This cruel and dangerous bill is part of a coordinated attack on trans youth moving nationwide,” the ACLU tweeted. “This moment doesn’t end here. Trans kids need us all in the fight, now.”
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said the recent success of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who swam on the university’s men’s team before transitioning, underscores the urgency of such measures.
“Women’s sports are under serious threat nationwide,” Mr. Schilling said. “That has only become more clear in recent months, as instances such as Lia Thomas’ domination of collegiate women’s swimming have gained national visibility. For those who care about protecting a fair playing field for female athletes, inaction is no longer an option.”
The South Dakota measure creates a private cause of action for any student who “suffers direct or indirect harm” against “the accredited school, school district, activities association or organization, or institution of higher learning” in the state.
The bill-signing came after a state House committee refused to introduce her abortion bill, which would have banned procedures after a heartbeat can be detected during pregnancy or about six to eight weeks.
Ms. Noem blamed the decision on legal advice from “one out-of-state lawyer.”
“South Dakota deserved to have a hearing on a bill to protect the heartbeats of unborn children. We can hear heartbeats at six weeks, but I’m disappointed this bill was not granted even one hearing,” she said in a statement.
Snap, the maker of the Snapchat app and the augmented reality glasses Spectacles, said during its third-quarter earnings report in October that Apple’s privacy changes were having an unexpected impact on its business. But the company is adapting, Snap said in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday, and the biggest impacts from Apple’s change may be behind it.
What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?
Card 1 of 5
The origins. The word “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel “Ready Player One.”
The future. Many people in tech believe the metaverse will herald an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it could still turn out to be a fad or even dangerous.
“We are making solid progress,” said Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer. The company offers its own measurement tools to advertisers to gauge the impact of their ads, and those tools are now used by more than 75 percent of its direct-response advertisers, Ms. Gorman said.
In its earnings report, Snap said that it had exceeded analyst expectations for revenue and user growth. In the last three months of 2021, Snap’s revenue was $1.3 billion, a 42 percent increase from the same period a year ago. Daily active users grew to 319 million, a 20 percent increase. The company profit was $22.5 million.
Snap’s share price rebounded after the news, shooting up more than 50 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.
In the last three months of the year, Pinterest’s revenue increased to $847 million, up 20 percent from the same period a year ago, the company said on Thursday. Its profit was $175 million, a 16 percent drop from 2020. Pinterest’s share price was up 29 percent in after-hours trading.
In the past, Twitter has said that Apple’s privacy push caused minimal disruptions to its business because much of its advertising came from brand awareness campaigns and large events, like the Olympics, rather than targeted advertising. Twitter is set to report its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 10.
But Apple, which reported its fourth-quarter earnings last week, indicated that privacy was profitable. Despite supply chain disruptions, Apple said that sales of iPhones totaled $71.6 billion, up 9 percent from a year earlier. The smartphone maker reported an 11 percent increase in revenue and a 20 percent jump in profit.
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, suffered its biggest one-day wipeout ever on Thursday as its stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged by more than $230 billion.
Its crash followed a dismal earnings report on Wednesday, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, laid out how the company was navigating a tricky transition from social networking toward the so-called virtual world of the metaverse. On Thursday, a company spokesman reiterated statements from its earnings announcement and declined to comment further.
Here are six reasons that Meta is in a difficult spot.
User growth has hit a ceiling.
The salad days of Facebook’s wild user growth are over.
Even though the company on Wednesday recorded modest gains in new users across its so-called family of apps — which includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — its core Facebook social networking app lost about half a million users over the fourth quarter from the previous quarter.
That’s the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history, during which time it had practically been defined by its ability to bring in more new users. The dip signaled that the core app may have reached its peak. Meta’s quarterly user growth rate was also the slowest it has been in at least three years.
Meta’s executives have pointed to other growth opportunities, like turning on the money faucet at WhatsApp, the messaging service that has yet to generate substantial revenue. But those efforts are nascent. Investors are likely to next scrutinize whether Meta’s other apps, such as Instagram, might begin to hit their top on user growth.
Apple’s changes are limiting Meta.
Last spring, Apple introduced an “App Tracking Transparency” update to its mobile operating system, essentially giving iPhone owners the choice as to whether they would let apps like Facebook monitor their online activities. Those privacy moves have now hurt Meta’s business and are likely to continue doing so.
Now that Facebook and other apps must explicitly ask people for permission to track their behavior, many users have opted out. That means less user data for Facebook, which makes targeting ads — one of the company’s main ways of making money — more difficult.
Doubly painful is that iPhone users are a far more lucrative market to Facebook’s advertisers than, say, Android app users. People who use iPhones to access the internet typically spend more money on products and apps served up to them from mobile ads.
Meta said on Wednesday that Apple’s changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue over the next year. The company has railed against Apple’s shifts and said they are bad for small businesses that rely on advertising on the social network to reach customers. But Apple is unlikely to reverse its privacy changes and Meta’s shareholders know it.
Google is stealing online advertising share.
Meta’s troubles have been its competitors’ good fortune.
On Wednesday, David Wehner, Meta’s chief financial officer, noted that as Apple’s changes have given advertisers less visibility into user behaviors, many have started shifting their ad budgets to other platforms. Namely Google.
In Google’s earnings call this week, the company reported record sales, particularly in its e-commerce search advertising. That was the very same category that tripped up Meta in the last three months of 2021.
Unlike Meta, Google is not heavily dependent on Apple for user data. Mr. Wehner said it was likely that Google had “far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes” than Meta’s ad platform.
Mr. Wehner also pointed to Google’s deal with Apple to be the default search engine for Apple’s Safari browser. That means Google’s search ads tend to appear in more places, taking in more data that can be useful for advertisers. That’s a huge problem for Meta in the long term, especially if more advertisers switch to Google search ads.
TikTok and Reels present a conundrum.
For more than a year, Mr. Zuckerberg has pointed to how formidable TikTok has been as a foe. The Chinese-backed app has grown to more than a billion users on the back of its highly shareable and strangely addictive short video posts. And it is fiercely competing with Meta’s Instagram for eyeballs and attention.
Meta has cloned TikTok with a video product feature called Instagram Reels. Mr. Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that Reels, which is prominently placed in people’s Instagram feeds, was currently the No. 1 driver of engagement across the app.
The problem is that while Reels may be attracting users, it doesn’t make money as effectively as Instagram’s other features, like Stories and the main feed. That’s because it’s slower to make money off video ads, since people tend to skip past them. That means the more that Instagram pushes people toward using Reels, the less money it may make on those users.
What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?
Card 1 of 5
The origins. The word “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel “Ready Player One.”
The future. Many people in tech believe the metaverse will herald an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it could still turn out to be a fad or even dangerous.
Mr. Zuckerberg compared the situation to a similar time several years ago when Instagram introduced its Stories feature, which was a clone of Snapchat. That product also did not make as much money for the company when it debuted, though the ad dollars eventually followed. Still, there’s no guarantee Instagram Reels can repeat that magic.
Spending on the metaverse is bonkers.
Mr. Zuckerberg believes so much that the internet’s next generation is the metaverse — a still fuzzy and theoretical concept that involves people moving across different virtual- and augmented-reality worlds — that he is willing to spend big on it.
So big that the spending amounted to more than $10 billion last year. Mr. Zuckerberg expects to spend even more in the future.
Yet there is no evidence the bet will pay off. Unlike Facebook’s shift to mobile devices in 2012, virtual reality use is still the province of niche hobbyists and has yet to really break into the mainstream. Widespread augmented-reality headsets are also months — if not years — away.
In essence, Mr. Zuckerberg is asking employees, users and investors to have faith in him and his metaverse vision. That’s a big ask for something that will cost the company billions in the coming years and that may never come to fruition.
The specter of antitrust looms.
The threat of regulators in Washington coming for Mr. Zuckerberg’s company is a headache that just won’t go away.
Meta faces multiple investigations, including from a newly aggressive Federal Trade Commission and multiple state attorneys general, into whether it acted in an anti-competitive manner. Lawmakers have also coalesced around congressional efforts to pass antitrust bills.
Mr. Zuckerberg has argued that Meta is not a social networking monopoly. He has pointed furiously to what he calls “unprecedented levels of competition,” including from TikTok, Apple, Google and other future opponents.
But the threat of antitrust action has made it more difficult for Meta to buy its way into new social networking trends. In the past, Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp with little scrutiny as those services gained billions of users. Now even some of Meta’s seemingly less contentious acquisitions in virtual reality and GIFs have been challenged by regulators globally.
With deal-making less likely, the onus is on Meta to innovate its way out of any challenges.
In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg might have been given the benefit of the doubt that he would be able to do so. But on Thursday at least, faith was in short supply on Wall Street.
Sarah Bloom Raskin’s past statements on climate regulation are stoking heated Republican opposition to her nomination to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision and could leave President Biden’s pick with a narrow path to confirmation.
Ms. Raskin, a former Fed and Treasury official who previously argued that financial regulators should police climate risks more diligently, faced resistance during her hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on Thursday.
She has been nominated alongside Lisa D. Cook and Philip N. Jefferson, economists up for seats on the Fed’s Board of Governors. The three need to first pass out of the committee and then must attract support from a majority of senators to win confirmation. It is unclear if Ms. Raskin, in particular, will clear those hurdles.
“The margin here is slim to none for her,” said Ian Katz, a managing director at Capital Alpha Partners.
That is especially true if Senator Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat who is recovering from a stroke, is not present for coming votes on the Fed nominations. A senior aide to Mr. Luján said Wednesday that he was expected to make a full recovery and would return in four to six weeks, barring complications.
If the banking committee deadlocks along party lines over Ms. Raskin’s nomination, a majority of America’s 100 senators could vote to move her past the committee. But unless Ms. Raskin can win Republican support, that may need to wait until Mr. Luján returns, since Democrats need all 50 senators who caucus with them and the vice president’s tiebreaker vote if all Republicans are opposed. And even then, Ms. Raskin may need to secure support from centrist Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to win confirmation.
“I’m not expecting her to get any votes from Republicans in the committee,” Mr. Katz said, estimating that she has less than a 60 percent chance of being confirmed. “It’s really, really close.”
Republicans have interpreted Ms. Raskin’s statements on climate-related regulation to mean that she would use her perch at the Fed to dissuade banks from lending to oil and gas companies. The energy industry has galvanized opposition to her nomination with a lobbying push to thwart confirmation. Ms. Raskin has faced much less resistance from the banks that she would oversee.
Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the committee, called Thursday’s hearing a “referendum on the Fed’s independence” during his opening remarks, and sharply criticized Ms. Raskin over her climate regulation views, which he previously called “disqualifying.”
Several Republican lawmakers referred to an opinion piece critical of government support for fossil fuel companies that Ms. Raskin wrote for The New York Times in 2020, as well as a post for Project Syndicate last year in which she argued that “all U.S. regulators can — and should — be looking at their existing powers and considering how they might be brought to bear on efforts to mitigate climate risk.”
Ms. Raskin struck a gentler tone Thursday, rebutting the idea that she would favor using bank supervision to choke off lending to oil and gas companies.
“It is inappropriate for the Fed to make credit decisions and allocations based on choosing winners and losers — banks choose their borrowers, the Fed does not,” Ms. Raskin said, repeatedly, in response to questions from senators. She also emphasized that Fed policymaking was a collaborative process.
But those assurances may not placate her critics. Republicans including Senator John Kennedy pushed her on her opinions, and Mr. Toomey expressed disbelief.
“This is one of the most remarkable cases of confirmation conversion I have ever seen,” Mr. Toomey said.
Lisa D. Cook, a Michigan State University economist known for her work in trying to improve diversity in economics, also faced questions from the committee on Thursday.Credit…Pool photo by Ken Cedeno
Ms. Raskin’s climate views were not the only thing Republicans focused on.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican from Wyoming, called into question whether Ms. Raskin had used her Fed connections to help to get a Fed master account for a financial technology firm, Reserve Trust, for which she served as a board member.
Ms. Lummis said it was “her understanding” that Ms. Raskin had called the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City about the matter, which Ms. Raskin neither confirmed nor denied during the hearing. The Kansas City Fed had no comment.
“Senator Lummis engaged innuendo with no facts presented to back up her false claims,” Chris Meagher, a White House spokesman, said following the hearing. The White House did not dispute that the Fed granted the Reserve Trust’s account while Ms. Raskin sat on its board.
Ms. Raskin served on the board of Reserve Trust from 2017 to 2019. The company was granted a Fed charter in 2018. Master accounts give companies access to the U.S. payment system infrastructure, allowing it to move money without partnering with a bank, among other advantages.
The company, which could not be immediately reached for comment, advertises on its website that it “is the first fintech trust company with a Federal Reserve master account,” and describes the advantages that confers.
Mr. Lummis suggested that Ms. Raskin may have financially benefited from her involvement with Reserve Trust. Ms. Raskin cashed out stocks in the firm for more than $1 million in 2020, her husband’s newly updated financial disclosures showed. That transaction is reflected as capital gains income on her own financial disclosures. Ms. Raskin is married to Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat.
It is unclear how, or whether, Ms. Raskin’s private sector dealings will influence her chances. Mr. Katz at Capital Alpha said it was probably not going to determine the outcome, but noted that “it’s not nothing” and it “could gain some legs.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a critic of the revolving door between regulators and private sector, seemed to hint at the issue during the hearing.
“I believe that we must examine a nominee’s total balance of qualifications,” she said. “But I’ve asked nominees from both the Republican and Democratic administrations to abide by higher ethical standards.”
Some centrist Democrats have sounded content with Ms. Raskin. But one critical lawmaker, Senator Manchin, said on Wednesday that he hadn’t yet studied the nominees.
He added that he was “going to get into that” because he’s “very concerned” about issues including inflation.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Ms. Raskin is a former deputy secretary at the Treasury Department and a former Fed governor, and she also spent several years as Maryland’s commissioner of financial regulation.
Mr. Toomey made it clear that he also had some reservations about Dr. Cook, but other Republicans seemed inclined to support her — including Senator Kennedy. That means that her nomination is likely to succeed unless she loses Democratic votes. Mr. Jefferson seems poised to clear the Senate easily, with the support of Mr. Toomey and others.
The Fed has seven governors — including its chair, vice chair and vice chair for supervision — who vote on monetary policy alongside five of its 12 regional bank presidents. Governors hold a constant vote on regulation.
Philip N. Jefferson, an administrator and economist at Davidson College who has worked as a research economist at the Fed, is also a nominee for the Fed’s board.Credit…Pool photo by Ken Cedeno
Dr. Cook, who would be the first Black woman ever to sit on the Fed’s board, is a Michigan State University economist well known for her work in trying to improve diversity in economics. She earned a doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and was an economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.
Dr. Jefferson, who is also Black, is an administrator and economist at Davidson College who has worked as a research economist at the Fed. He has written about the economics of poverty, and his research has delved into whether monetary policy that stokes investment with low interest rates helps or hurts less-educated workers.
Dr. Cook, Dr. Jefferson and Ms. Raskin are up for confirmation alongside Jerome H. Powell — for his renomination as Fed chair — and Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who is the Biden administration’s pick for vice chair.
Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee chairman, said on Wednesday that all five candidates would face a key committee vote on Feb. 15, and that Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, “knows to move quickly” for a full floor vote.
A U.S. commando raid in northwest Syria that resulted in the death of the leader of the Islamic State struck a major blow to the terrorist group and their potential to conduct future operations, Pentagon officials said Thursday, but added the threat is far from neutralized.
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was behind a recent brazen attack on a Kuridsh-run prison in Syria holding Islamic State fighters and orchestrated the genocide of thousands of Yazidis in Iraq in 2014. U.S. officials say he died after detonating an explosive device as U.S. special operations troops were closing on the building where he was living with his wife and two children in a village near the Syrian border with Turkey.
“They are still a threat. Nobody is taking a victory lap here,” chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.
The shadowy al-Qurayshi was named the leader of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in October 2019 after the death of his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during a U.S. raid in the same region earlier that month.
“He was very much involved in trying to resuscitate the group,” Mr. Kirby said. “This is a man we should all be happy is no longer walking on the face of the earth.”
Pentagon officials said the terrorist fighter detonated the explosive device in the early stages of the raid, which lasted about two hours. His wife and children also were killed in the blast, so powerful that it flung bodies outside of the house.
The raid was months in the planning and officials decided it should be a special operations raid, rather than a cruise missile or drone strike, out of concern for the safety of locals. The U.S. troops used loudspeakers to coax 10 people out of the building before they went in, officials said.
“We’re always mindful of the potential for civilian harm,” Mr. Kirby said. “The lives of innocents taken in this operation were caused by [al-Qurayshi] and his decision to blow himself up along with everybody else with him on that floor.”
The U.S. military does its best to avoid civilian harm during a combat operation, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
“We know that al-Qurayshi and others at his compound directly caused the deaths of women and children last night,” he said. “But, given the complexity of this mission, we will take a look at the possibility our actions may also have resulted in harm to innocent people.”
The operation was under the direction of U.S. Central Command. Military officials identified the body through fingerprints and DNA analysis. A small group of locals approached the U.S. troops on the ground.
“They were appropriately deemed as hostile and they were engaged. Two of them were killed,” Mr. Kirby said.
Despite bringing down a terrorist with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, the raid drew mixed reactions on Capitol Hill.
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it’s always a better day when there is one less terrorist in the world. But he faulted the administration for what he said was a lack of a coherent approach to counterterrorism and said Thursday’s raid raised new questions about the Pentagon‘s insistence it could deal with post-Afghanistan threats from jihadist terror groups such as the Islamic State without putting troops on the ground in vulnerable areas.
“In fact, it raises questions about the Biden administration’s counterterrorism strategy,” Mr. Inhofe said in a statement. “For many months, the administration has insisted that it can effectively counter terrorists through ‘over-the-horizon’ operations.”
Rep. Adam Smith, the Washington state Democrat who leads the House Armed Services Committee, reserved the lion’s share of the praise for the troops involved, but gave some of the credit to the leadership within the Biden administration.
“This successful operation does not mark the end of the ISIS threat or the counterterrorism challenge,” Mr. Smith said. “The United States must remain vigilant in the face of such threats.”
In her poignant and imaginative new novel, “Pure Colour,” Sheila Heti opens with an unusual concept: Humans are bears, fish or birds.
Those who care most about their closest relationships are bears. People focused on the common good are fish. And those most preoccupied by beauty and aesthetics are birds.
“People born from these three different eggs will never completely understand each other,” Heti writes, but “fish, birds and bears are all equally important in the eye of God.”
It is an idea she has been turning over in her mind for the better part of 15 years. When she was writing her breakout novel “How Should a Person Be?” more than a decade ago, she envisioned the possibility that “God was three art critics in the sky,” she said in a video interview from her home in Toronto last month.
Criticism figures prominently in Heti’s worldview (“I think the critic is trying to keep bad art out of art history”) as well as “Pure Colour,” which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish on Feb. 15. Heti, 45, initially set out to write a novel about art criticism, and traces of her original project flicker across the book.
Her protagonist, Mira, a young woman living in a “first draft of existence,” enrolls in a prestigious critics training academy, where inchoate writers learn how to think. (Mira, it should be said, is a bird.)
As a student, Mira encounters and falls in love with a young woman named Annie. But Mira’s most complicated relationship is with her father, who introduces her to the beauty and mystery of the world, and whose love she both cherished and found stifling. “Mira craved to live a cold ice bath of a life,” Heti writes. “It had been hard to be held so closely by the most bearish bear.”
Once her father dies, however, the story’s heart skips a beat. Mira, who had been so certain of her path and her desires, reconsiders her choices. Her father’s soul transforms into a leaf, and Mira joins him there for a time, weighing whether to stay suspended in the comfort of his closeness or return to living a full life.
Heti did not intend to write a book about loss. In 2018, as she was drafting “Pure Colour,” her father died, and she began writing about her experiences and emotions in longhand, separate from the novel.
It wasn’t until she looked back at what she wrote months later that she realized it belonged in what became “Pure Colour.” (Heti is writing a limited-run newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section based on her diary entries from the past decade.)
“I’ve never had a book unfold for me in such a surprising way,” she said.
Heti, the author of 10 books, is accustomed to borrowing from her own life to feed her fiction. Her two most recent novels, “Motherhood,” about a woman’s decision whether to have a child, and “How Should a Person Be?,” feature protagonists who are Canadian writers. They are questioning, restless and look outside themselves — to their friends, to art, to the I Ching — for answers. Reconstituted email exchanges and relayed conversations often appear in Heti’s work, inviting comparisons to autofiction writers such as Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner.
“She understands what it takes to examine and make something out of nothing,” the author and artist Leanne Shapton, a friend of Heti’s who has collaborated with her on several illustrated projects, said in an email. “That sometimes making work is like giving CPR to a drowning victim for 36 hours, or months, straight. Whether it lives or dies, she’s there.”
Heti grew up in Toronto, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish parents, and Jewish theology and history shapes much of her work. She studied art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto after leaving the National Theater School of Canada, where she seriously considered becoming a playwright. (Playwriting once appealed to her more than writing novels, she has said, which “seemed the most boring possible thing you could do.”)
Her first book, a collection of fable-like tales called “The Middle Stories,” was published in 2001, when she was 24. Her 2005 novel, “Ticknor,” was inspired by the real-life friendship between the 19th-century authors William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor.
But with “How Should a Person Be?,” released in the United States in 2012, Heti began “thinking about the novel from scratch and what writing was for me,” she said. Even though she had already written two books, “I had so many very basic questions that I felt I needed to answer.”
Her friendship with the painter Margaux Williamson — along with remembered conversations and scenes from her life — form the backbone of “How Should a Person Be?,” which is divided into acts like a play and explores how the two women arranged their lives as artists.
“In her work, she’s used herself as the fool — she’s practiced at being self deprecating,” Williamson said. “But what Sheila’s doing is acknowledging the ego that’s present in every creative work and getting it out of the way.”
Some reviewers of “How Should a Person Be?” took issue with what they saw as the narrator’s self-involvement. But others praised Heti’s perceptiveness and voice; the Times book critic Dwight Garner included it as one of the 15 books by women that were changing 21st-century fiction.
The inquisitiveness that guides her writing matches Heti’s real-life curiosity. For years, she was the interviews editor for the literary magazine The Believer, talking to everyone from Dave Hickey to Joan Didion.
“She is a writer who is truly an artist,” Shapton said. “She does not stop at illustrating or illuminating, she’s always asking questions, thinking, philosophizing.”
The intoxication Heti felt when she embarked on “How Should a Person Be?” wasn’t there as she was drafting “Pure Colour.” “Maybe that only happens once in your life,” she said. “Maybe you can do it again after 30 years, but not after 20 years. I like that feeling of learning and questioning everything from the beginning and starting with all new assumptions.”
But there is a noticeable shift in tone in “Pure Colour.” Williamson noticed the change, too, after reading an early draft. Even after decades of friendship, she said, “I didn’t know the depth that Sheila made inside herself.”
In Heti’s earlier books, readers see characters in the world engaging in philosophical or aesthetic jousts, at parties, in conversation with friends. The characters in those novels don’t tend to linger in discomfort: Scenes and moods change quickly. But readers of “Pure Colour” stay with Mira through some wrenching emotion.
Part of the change, Heti said, comes from her “becoming less afraid of feeling things.” With an experience as all-encompassing as grief, “there isn’t really a way of running away from it.”
There are fewer characters in “Pure Colour,” which mirrors Heti’s changing life. “I was so interested in people for so long,” Heti said, that she encountered curiosity burnout. “I came to the end of whatever I was searching for.”
With the book poised for release, it’s too soon for Heti to know what her next project might be. But she has questions, of course.
“What would it be like to write without trying to fix anything, or repair anything or beautify anything, or comfort or entertain?” she wondered. “What if you take away all of those motivations? What kind of writing happens then?”
In case it wasn’t clear, Heti, like Mira, is a bird — “obviously,” she said, with a laugh.
