With Snap ‘Yes’ in Oval Office, Trump Gambles on North Korea
WASHINGTON — Summoned to the Oval Office on the spur of the moment, the South Korean envoy found himself face to face with President Trump one afternoon last week at what he thought might be a hinge moment in history.
Chung Eui-yong had come to the White House bearing an invitation. But he opened with flattery, which diplomats have discovered is a key to approaching the volatile American leader. “We could come this far thanks to a great degree to President Trump,” Mr. Chung said. “We highly appreciate this fact.”
Then he got to the point: The United States, South Korea and their allies should not repeat their “past mistakes,” but South Korea believed that North Korea’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong-un, was “frank and sincere” when he said he wanted to talk with the Americans about giving up his nuclear program. Mr. Kim, he added, had told the South Koreans that if Mr. Trump would join him in an unprecedented summit meeting, the two could produce a historic breakthrough.
Mr. Trump accepted on the spot, stunning not only Mr. Chung and the other high-level South Koreans who were with him, but also the phalanx of American officials who were gathered in the Oval Office.
His advisers had assumed the president would take more time to discuss such a decision with them first. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, both expressed caution. If you go ahead with this, they told Mr. Trump, there will be risks and downsides.
Rebecca Miller on the Mother of All Subjects: Her Father
Arthur Gelb, the human pinball machine who served for decades as The New York Times culture czar, had many fantastic stories. But my favorite was his attempt to assign our music critic a feature on Wanda Horowitz.
Arthur had met her at a dinner party one night and was intrigued by what life must be like when you are sandwiched between two artistic geniuses, catering to both. Wanda was the daughter of Arturo Toscanini and the wife of Vladimir Horowitz.
The critic, Harold Schonberg, invited her to lunch at the Algonquin, where she promptly had a fit. “Why am I talking to you about the miserable life I’ve been through with these two men!” she shrieked. “They ruined my life and they should roast in hell!” Interview over.
So when I find myself having lunch at Morandi in the West Village with Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller and the wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, I can’t resist asking her: What is it like to be sandwiched between two artistic geniuses, catering to both?
Ms. Miller, being as airy as Ms. Horowitz was acerbic, simply laughs.
“I knew them,” she says of the Horowitzes. “They’d come over to our house and he’d bring his own food because he was worried he was going to get poisoned. She seemed like a fairly dark character and he was very sensitive. He would play on our ridiculous piano. I could see where Horowitz wasn’t a barrel of laughs to be married to.”
As the beloved daughter of one of America’s most famous playwrights, Ms. Miller met everyone who was anyone, all from a worm’s eye vantage point in their home in Roxbury, Conn.
“For reasons I still haven’t figured out, nobody would put me to bed when they had dinner parties, so I was expected to just go under the table,” she said of her father and her mother, the esteemed Austrian photographer, Inge Morath. “And there was a big trestle in the middle and I would lie on this five-inch trestle because I was very narrow and just listen and be in my own imagination. Our very greedy dachshund was down there, too, making laps, looking for scraps.
“It’s a life that’s gone now, a life of artists who believed that if a coffee pot was broken, you welded it back together. It wasn’t a fancy life and it was very much about work and about decency in a certain way. I remember the McGovern fund-raiser in the barn that my father had when I was a kid. I wore purple hot pants thinking I was just so cool. And the Styrons and the Calders and all the people who lived in those hills in those days were there. They were bohemians in a way, but they were also very straight people. It wasn’t a bohemia or even Bloomsbury. They weren’t sleeping around. They were just hard-working people who drank a lot of wine at night.”
Greece’s Island of Despair
His brown eyes sunken and flat, Jahangir Baroch had spent another sleepless night in the metal container on the Greek island of Lesbos where he has lived for more than a year.
“There was no electricity in the container last night,” Mr. Baroch, 26, said desperately, at a center for refugees, away from the holding camp in Moria, where he is housed. “It was like a fridge.”
“I want to go to Athens,” said Mr. Baroch, who came from Baluchistan, an embattled province in Pakistan. “If you don’t want me, I want to go to another country.”
“Why am I here?” he asked, somberly.
Others are asking the same question two years after the European Union struck a deal with Turkey aimed at cutting off the route across the Aegean Sea for asylum seekers, many propelled by wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since then, thousands have remained stranded on Lesbos, unwilling to go back to the countries they left, unable to move forward, toward the opportunity they had hoped to find in Europe. Though the numbers are fewer, they keep coming.
The lucky ones, whose asylum applications are accepted, are eventually shipped to the Greek mainland. Those whose applications are rejected (they can apply twice) are sent back to Turkey as part of the deal with the European Union.
But neither country, it seems, has much motivation to accept them. The Greek authorities sift their cases slowly, for months at a time, as the asylum seekers live in limbo, trapped in conditions so deplorable Pope Francis likened them to a concentration camp.
The scale of the migration crisis that brought them to Lesbos can be measured in piles of discarded life vests that still blight the island. But increasingly it is tallied in despair.
A Bittersweet Journey Back to Puerto Rico After Maria
Enrique López’s leg had gone numb again. Unable to stand, Enrique remained slouched on the couch while his children scrambled to pack his belongings and clean the hotel room as the checkout hour drew near.
“Should we give Dad his passport now or at the airport?” José López, 55, asked his sister, Magaly López.
“No, he’ll lose it,” Magaly, 56, said. “And make sure there are no liquids! Did we pack mami’s medicine?”
Their mother, Emma López, gobbled rice and beans from a plastic container, her last meal at the all-suite motel in Queens.
Enrique, 81, and Emma, 75, weren’t just checking out of a hotel. The couple was about to embark on a daunting, and, to their children, a frightening journey — they were boarding a plane to Puerto Rico, five months after Hurricane Maria’s devastating fury had forced them to abandon their home.
On the floor, Omaira López, the younger daughter, sat on her parents’ only suitcase as she struggled to zip it shut. Omaira, 44, was quieter than usual. She worried about her mother’s ongoing struggle with Alzheimer’s and the severe stroke her father had suffered two weeks earlier.
Omaira and her three siblings, who live in New York, had been dreading this day, fearful of how their parents would fare alone on an island that is still reeling. But the married couple had been anticipating their return since they fled the island in October.
As Enrique put it before leaving the hotel for the last time, “I’m in heaven here, but I’m going back to paradise.”
The Rise and Fall of Tiangong-1, China’s First Space Station
China’s Tiangong-1 space station is expected to burn into Earth’s atmosphere this weekend.
Tiangong-1 is about 34 feet long and roughly the size of a school bus.
China launched the station in 2011, last visited it in 2013 and lost communications in 2016 after an apparent malfunction.
The small, quickly moving station has been a target for amateur and professional photographers.
Falling Slowly. Without working communications, China was unable to perform any of the periodic boosts that are required to keep space stations in orbit. Since December 2015, Tiangong-1 has been falling as it gradually brushes against the upper atmosphere.
Radar images show that the spacecraft is slowly spinning, about once every two and a half minutes.
Tracking the Station. Tiangong-1 orbits Earth in a band between 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south latitudes. The northern half of that band is more heavily populated, but the chances of anyone being hit by falling space debris are extremely low.
A live tracker from the Aerospace Corporation shows the station’s current location and altitude, and predicts that Tiangong-1 will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday or early Monday.
Launching the Station. Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011 atop a Long March rocket.
Future Plans. China launched its second space station, Tiangong-2, in September 2016. A third, larger station is planned.
‘2 Bitter Options’ for Syrians Trapped Between Assad and Extremists
BEIRUT, Lebanon — When pro-government forces retook her hometown from Syrian rebels, Nisrine accepted the same surrender deal the government has offered tens of thousands of Syrians: a one-way bus trip to a place she had never been — the northern, rebel-held province of Idlib.
Since Syria’s war began, the population of Idlib has doubled as it has taken in a motley mix of fleeing civilians, defeated rebels, hard-line jihadists and those like Nisrine who have packed up their families to ride the government surrender bus.
But as government forces wrap up a blistering campaign in eastern Ghouta, Idlib is likely to be the next target. And this time, there will be nowhere else to run.
“Maybe this is the last chapter of the revolution,” Nisrine, 36, an Arabic teacher from the onetime tourist resort of Madaya, said in an online interview recently. “Syrians are killing Syrians. Nothing matters anymore. We decided to die standing up. I’m sad for the revolution, how it’s gone, how people called for freedom and now it’s gone.”
Idlib, a small, conservative province on the Turkish border, is Syria’s largest remaining rebel-held area. One of the earliest regions to revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, it may be the place where the revolution that began more than seven years ago finally ends.
The government has carried out scorched-earth airstrikes there with its ally, Russia, routinely hitting hospitals and clinics, schools and neighborhood markets.
But people are still coming.
In recent days, more than 10,000 fighters and civilians have been bused to Idlib from surrendering sections of eastern Ghouta. They arrive traumatized, exhausted and disillusioned, often with children suffering from malnutrition after years of siege.
The government has treated the province as a dumping ground for those it does not want in its territory, and paints the province as a nest of jihadists. But the vast majority in Idlib are civilians, including nonviolent activists who could face arrest and torture if they remained in government areas and who often push back against hard-liners in the province they believe have co-opted the revolt.
Marwan Habaq, who survived the barrages in eastern Ghouta in a basement with his wife and infant daughter Yasmina, is taking them to Idlib. It is a tough choice because, as they have no place to live in Idlib, they will have to leave his wife’s parents behind and they will face more shelling. But if they stay, he is sure he will be arrested or forced into military service.
“Two bitter options,” he said. “Leaving to the unknown, or staying within Assad’s hands.”
But the move only delays the inevitable.
“It’s a shame on the world,” said Mehran Ouyoun, a member of the opposition council in exile for the Damascus suburbs, which meets in Turkey. “If you approve the war crime of forced evacuation, at least make sure these people don’t suffer again and again.”
Idlib was once controlled by a patchwork of clashing insurgents, some led by American-backed army defectors calling for a civil state. Others, including an Al Qaeda affiliate, welcomed foreign fighters and espoused a spectrum of Islamist ideologies. But hard-liners have seized the upper hand, playing into the government’s portrayal of the region even as they create tensions with residents who oppose them.
As they struggle to survive, many residents are caught between government attacks from the sky and the overbearing rule of extremist factions that dominate on the ground.
Nisrine joined the revolution at the outset in 2011, pushing for a secular, civil democracy. Like a dozen other Idlib residents interviewed for this article by phone and email, she asked not to be fully identified for fear of retribution from any side.
She boarded a bus for Idlib last year after surviving a year of siege and bombardment, hoping that her son Abdullah, 10, would not starve to death like some children had in her town, Madaya. At first, she was excited to be reunited with her husband, a former law student and rebel fighter who had gone to Idlib two years earlier.
She did not regret leaving Madaya. After the government takeover there, her brother and brothers-in-law were drafted and sent to the front with minimal training. They died in battle.
But Nisrine was troubled by Idlib City’s ubiquitous jihadist billboards, face veils and cafes segregating women and banning them from smoking water pipes. When she wears her usual head scarf and modest coat, religious enforcers lecture her for not veiling her face.
The Ex-Jihadi in Plain Sight
We met in a European city where he didn’t live, a neutral location on a quiet side street far from the crowds of shoppers and sightseers. To passers-by, he looked like a hipster, dressed in rust-colored skinny pants and a gray polo shirt. But he was not. I had known him for years in his native Syria. He was a onetime confidant of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, then the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria.
Saleh, as I called him, was a former member of the small inner circle of the Nusra Front, a group of men so young that, as Saleh put it, “none of us have any gray in our beards.” He was part of the machinery that helped Al Qaeda’s local affiliate plant its black flags in Syrian rebel territory. He had been since late 2011, just months into a peaceful uprising that became a war so ghastly it killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced half the population of 23 million — a war that is still killing and displacing Syrians.
I had covered the conflict from inside Syria since the first protests in 2011. Saleh had joined the throngs that left his shattered homeland for Europe, escaping a battlefield that was as complicated as it was horrific.
He had defected from the Nusra Front with the leader’s tacit blessing, claiming to have left his old life behind. In the year since he’d fled, he’d added two European languages to his English and Arabic, busying himself, he told me, “with learning something, anything, to quiet the thoughts in my head.” He reflected on Nusra’s mistakes, on his path to militant Islamism, the Jihadi infighting between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and a Syria he’d worked to cloak in Islamist black.
“Now I can see the whole chessboard. Before, I was a piece,” he said. “I wasn’t a regular soldier, I was with the command. I saw things,” he added, pausing for a long while. “There are many people we oppressed.”
With distance, he saw that members of the rebel Free Syrian Army weren’t the “kuffar,” or infidels, he had been conditioned to despise, the men Nusra planned to destroy after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Nusra was just as unscrupulous as the groups he’d self-righteously berated and could be as ruthless as its foes in the Islamic State. It killed Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It stole from civilians and institutions. It had commanders hungry for power and money, driven by ego and fame, men who Saleh said “wanted to be the next Osama bin Laden,” who could kill a friend as easily as drink a sip of water.
The infighting with the Islamic State proved that. That was Saleh’s breaking point: “We were brothers and days later we were killing each other,” he said. “I started wondering, what are people like this made of?”
He was a man who had never been photographed with the Nusra Front, who was careful to never appear in any of the group’s video or audio recordings. He had a fake Syrian ID for entering Turkey and could blend into a cafe in Istanbul as easily as into a Nusra training camp.
Hope Hicks Is Gone, and It’s Not Clear Who Can Replace Her
WASHINGTON — Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who worked behind the scenes to direct the president through multiple professional crises — and decided to resign after she found herself exhausted by them — has left the building.
Those left behind are wondering what happens now.
Thursday was the last day at the White House for Ms. Hicks, a 29-year-old from Connecticut, whose unlikely career trajectory from corporate public relations hand to White House communications director kept pace with President Trump’s own unorthodox rise to the Oval Office. Over three and a half years, from the early trenches of the presidential campaign to desks within earshot of each other in the West Wing, Ms. Hicks had become Mr. Trump’s most trusted aide — and, perhaps most important, his unofficial translator to the rest of the staff.
“Her ability to anticipate what he wants and also execute can’t be replicated,” said Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman. “At least not immediately.”
Ms. Hicks never gave a single on-camera interview during her time in the White House. Unlike her boss, attention from the news media was never something she sought.
But by the time Ms. Hicks announced in February that she would leave her post, she had unwillingly moved from her preferred behind-the-scenes role into the center of a White House scandal over security clearances. It was kick-started by reports that Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary whom she had been dating, had abused two former wives. In days, Ms. Hicks’s image was splashed across tabloids, cable news and gossip websites.
Redemption of a Lost Prodigy
As the sun set and the tide started to rise around City Island, the seaside village off the eastern tip of the Bronx, Saul Chandler took his seat at a bar called the Snug. Mr. Chandler, 70, a small man who smokes cheap cigars and refuses Budweiser not in glass bottles, is one of the island’s waterfront eccentrics. He is a bar-stool fixture at the pub, known for telling bawdy jokes and paying the tabs of strangers before slipping into the night.
He likes rambling about his boat, a two-masted schooner docked nearby. The shipyard was lonesome throughout winter, but he was usually in the hull of the schooner drinking beer and sawing wood by lamplight, classical music echoing from a radio in his cabin. He mostly tells stories: how he glued himself to a boat he was repairing and had to rip himself free and wander off in his underpants, how he nearly sank in the Bermuda Triangle, how he has named vessels after the Herman Melville novels “Typee” and “Omoo.”
After a few beers, however, Mr. Chandler might tell a story that is not of the cheerful maritime sort:
“I played Carnegie Hall twice before I was 13.”
“I was known for my Bach.”
“They turned me into a trained monkey.”
“If I could forget about music I would.”
When asked to say more, he shrugs, and the stories fade into the barroom haze. But this mysterious specter follows him to his boat. When music is playing on the radio, if a certain violin concerto comes on, he may get up and switch the station off. “The violin upsets me,” he said. “It reminds me of terror.”
Specifically, it reminds him of his gift. A gift he has spent his life trying to forget.
In the 1960s, Mr. Chandler was one of the most promising classical violin prodigies in New York. He started attending the Juilliard School of Music’s prestigious preparatory division when he was 9, he played at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall before he was 11, and he performed Mozart live on WNYC when he was 13. His pedigree was of the highest order: he was a student of Ivan Galamian, the legendary Armenian violin teacher who taught future superstars of classical music like Michael Rabin and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Chandler’s greatest triumph, he claims, was once getting a better grade than a teenage Itzhak Perlman at Juilliard. “No one could beat him,” he said, dragging on his cigar. “Not until me.”
But when Mr. Chandler turned 16, the pressures of producing excellence consumed him, and he had a nervous breakdown that derailed his career. He estranged himself from classical music and in an act of reinvention legally changed his name. He would lead a circuitous life that has since involved running a seedy hotel in Times Square, a successful career in mathematics and dramatic voyages at sea. Thirty years ago he started building boats on City Island, where he found peace on its waters. “I don’t want to be remembered for who I was,” he said. “Because I ended up doing a lot of other great things in my life, too. People here know me for who I am now.”
Mr. Chandler’s story is also part of a certain New York myth: that of the fallen wonder child. For every Itzhak Perlman or Midori who rises to stardom from the hothouse environments of the city’s performing arts schools, there are surely hundreds of talents that flare out. Ann Hulbert, the author of “Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies,” offered a reason for our enduring interest in this tragic narrative. “We are fascinated by the dark turns because we get satisfaction,” she said. “There becomes a grim moral: If you are exceptional, you’re bound for trouble.”
On his boat recently, Mr. Chandler discussed his brush with classical music greatness, finishing half a pack of smokes over three hours. He was a reluctant subject who initially saw little reason to revisit his past and repeatedly declined to be interviewed until, after I paid him several visits on City Island over the winter, he ran out of objections. “Most of the people involved are dead.”
“My biggest regret in life is that I let lots of people down,” he said. “They worked hard. But they worked hard to turn me into a trained monkey. Anyone can become a monkey. Even a chimpanzee can become a concert violinist.”
Saul Robert Lipshutz, as his parents named him, was born in Brooklyn in 1947, and grew up in Paterson, N.J. His mother was an Austrian war bride and his father was a noted mathematician. His musical life started when he was 6 after his grandfather suggested he learn the violin. Mr. Chandler discovered a natural connection to the instrument, and Juilliard accepted him in 1957 when he was 9. “I was already good,” he said. “Then I got better. Really fast.” At the school, then on West 122nd Street, he became a student of Margaret Pardee, who was one of three assistants to the legendary string pedagogue and the head of Juilliard’s violin department, Ivan Galamian. After this point, the violin ceased to be a mere hobby for Mr. Chandler.
Do Hangovers Get Worse as We Age?
Q. It seems like my hangovers are much worse now that I am older, 42, to the point I can’t even have one drink without feeling listless the next day. What can I do, besides drinking water while drinking alcohol, to improve the situation?
A. The real “problem” might be that you’re drinking less as you age, which reduces your tolerance for alcohol, said Lara Ray, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who researches alcoholism. Someone with the self-image of a partying twentysomething but the lifestyle of a responsible 42-year-old may simply have lost the tolerance for a lot of alcohol, she said.
“Age may be a proxy for regularity of drinking,” Dr. Ray said. “If you haven’t gone to a party for two to three weeks, it might be less about being 40 and more about your drinking history.”
Also, as we age, we lose muscle mass, replacing it with fat. The same drink will cause more intoxication in a body with a higher fat content compared with a leaner one, she said. But this tends to be true more for people over 65 than over 40, she said.
Dr. Ray suggests drinking more slowly to compensate for this change in body composition, and to drink more water or other liquids to dilute the alcohol. A quick spike in blood alcohol levels followed by a quick drop make hangovers more likely, she said, so avoiding those sudden changes should help.
The biological basis of hangovers is still unclear, said Dr. Marc Schuckit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Some people think being hung over is a mild form of alcohol withdrawal; others think hangovers are caused by dehydration or an imbalance of electrolytes like sodium, potassium or magnesium, he said.
Michigan Ends Loyola-Chicago’s Wild Ride in the Final Four
SAN ANTONIO — Moritz Wagner — but you can call him Moe — patiently held the ball at the 3-point arc. He waited for his Michigan teammate Charles Matthews to make his move, cutting to the basket. Then Wagner sent a gorgeous bounce pass to Matthews, who laid the ball in to give the Wolverines a 4-point lead with less than six minutes to play in their N.C.A.A. tournament semifinal on Saturday.
In addition to that assist, Wagner had 16 points and 14 rebounds at that point, and it seemed reasonable to ask: Is there anything he can’t do?
A 6-foot-11 German, Wagner all but single-handedly brought an end to one of the wildest long-shot runs in tournament history, leading third-seeded Michigan to a grinding 69-57 victory over 11th-seeded Loyola-Chicago.
Michigan will meet either Villanova or Kansas, two top seeds who were set to play in the other semifinal later Saturday at the Alamodome. Loyola, the enthralling underdog and one of just four teams seeded so low to reach the Final Four, was seeking to become the lowest seed ever in the final.
It will be Michigan’s first appearance in the title game since 2013, when the Wolverines lost to Louisville, whose championship was recently vacated because of N.C.A.A. violations.
For Loyola, the loss was gutting, because the Ramblers seemed to have the game in hand. They led by 7 at halftime, 29-22, despite not scoring over a stretch of more than five minutes early on. They were up by as much as 10 in the second half.
Cameron Krutwig, a freshman center, led Loyola with 17 points, while Clayton Custer, a redshirt junior, had 15 points on nine shots.
Wagner, a junior, had 11 rebounds and 11 points in the first half, for 50 percent of the Wolverines’ scoring. Loyola’s help defense effectively prevented Michigan from getting the ball to him inside, so instead the Wolverines’ offense consisted largely of shooting 3-pointers (they attempted 13), missing them (they made just two) and letting Wagner get the offensive rebound for the putback.
He finished the game with 24 points, 15 rebounds and that one assist.
Near the end, Wagner hustled out of bounds for the ball, leaping off the Alamodome’s elevated court. The television analyst Grant Hill, who won two N.C.A.A. championships at Duke, high-fived Wagner on his way back, almost as if welcoming him to the club.
Michigan will be seeking its second title on Monday, having beaten Seton Hall in 1989. It has played in the championship game four other times, in 1965, ’76, ’92 and ’93, but the appearances in the ’90s, with the so-called Fab Five, were erased by the N.C.A.A. because of infractions.
If defense wins championships, then Michigan is in luck. The Wolverines were primarily an offensive team before this season because Coach John Beilein is an expert on that side of the court. But a new assistant coach, Luke Yaklich, who was in the high school ranks as recently as 2013, reinvigorated Michigan’s defense, making it one of the best in the country.
Scott Pruitt, E.P.A. Chief, Rented Residence From Wife of Energy Lobbyist
WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, rented a residence in Washington in 2017 that was partly owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist whose firm, according to disclosure forms, conducted business before the E.P.A. that same year.
While the agency said on Friday that the arrangement was consistent with federal ethics rules, the developments come as Mr. Pruitt is already under fire from Congress regarding unrelated ethics questions. In February, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee ordered Mr. Pruitt to turn over documents related to his first-class travel at taxpayer expense, questioning whether he had received the appropriate waivers to do so.
The housing arrangement surfaced on Thursday after ABC News reported that Mr. Pruitt had paid $50 per night to rent a bedroom in a condominium on Capitol Hill for the first half of 2017. The E.P.A. later shared documents with Bloomberg News showing that the arrangement was not a traditional monthly rental agreement; instead Mr. Pruitt paid only for the nights that he slept in the room. His payments amounted to $6,100 over six months.
A typical full studio or one-bedroom apartment in the same area would cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per month or much more, a search of current listings indicates. In a statement, Jahan Wilcox, an E.P.A. spokesman, referred to a memo from the agency’s designated ethics counsel, dated Friday, saying that, “Under the terms of the lease, if the space was utilized for one 30-day month, then the rental cost would be $1,500, which is a reasonable market value.”
Federal ethics rules generally prohibit employees in the executive branch from receiving outside gifts. Mr. Wilcox said the memo showed that the housing arrangement “was not a gift and the lease was consistent with federal ethics regulations.”
Walter M. Shaub Jr., who until last July was the director of the Office of Government Ethics, pointed out that federal ethics guidelines say that “employees should consider declining gifts when they believe that their integrity or impartiality would be questioned if they were to accept the gift.”
According to the E.P.A., the landlord of the building was Vicki Hart, the president and founder of a health care lobbying firm that does not have business before the agency.
Her husband, J. Steven Hart, is the chairman of a Washington lobbying firm, Williams & Jensen, with several energy clients including OGE Energy Corporation, Cheniere Energy and Colonial Pipeline.
According to lobbying disclosure records, Mr. Hart’s firm reported lobbying the E.P.A. on behalf of OGE Energy, an energy company based in Oklahoma, on greenhouse gas regulations and other rules affecting electric utilities. The forms were previously reported by E&E News.
Mr. Hart did not respond to a request for comment.
E&E News reported that Mr. Hart said that he had not personally lobbied the E.P.A. in the past two years and was unaware that his firm had done so, and that a federal disclosure form listing him as having lobbied the E.P.A. on behalf of a glass-container manufacturer was an error that he would ask to have corrected.
Democrats in Congress were quick to criticize the agency chief. “From the very beginning, Scott Pruitt has acted as if the E.P.A. is his own personal fiefdom,” Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, who sits on the House committee that oversees the agency, said in a statement.
Mr. Pruitt’s relationships with both Mr. Hart and OGE Energy go back several years. In 2014, Mr. Hart held a fund-raising event for Mr. Pruitt while Mr. Pruitt was the attorney general of Oklahoma. The Washington Post quoted Mr. Hart on Friday saying that he was a “casual friend” of Mr. Pruitt’s and hadn’t had contact with him “for many months.”
As Oklahoma attorney general, Mr. Pruitt joined with one of OGE Energy’s subsidiaries, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, to sue the Obama administration over a regional haze rule that would have required coal-fired power plants to install pollution controls. Mr. Pruitt eventually lost his case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court.
In March 2017, Mr. Pruitt met with OGE Energy as well as a lobbyist in Mr. Hart’s firm, according to a copy of his daily schedule that was released last year. Also last year, the E.P.A. asked a federal court to delay the haze rule requirements for Texas. A federal court later denied the request.
Brian Alford, a spokesman for OGE Energy, said the company was previously unaware of Mr. Pruitt’s rental agreement.
Mr. Hart’s firm through the end of 2017 also represented Cheniere Energy, lobbying on issues “related to the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG), approval of LNG exports and export facilities,” according to a disclosure report.
Mr. Pruitt traveled to Morocco last year to promote the export of natural gas. That trip is the subject of an investigation by the E.P.A.’s inspector general, based on requests from Senate Democrats.
In a statement, Rachel Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Cheniere Energy, noted that the company had not been aware of Mr. Pruitt’s rental arrangement and had not used Mr. Hart’s company to lobby the E.P.A.
Jeffrey Lagda, the E.P.A. inspector general, said his office had been made aware of Mr. Pruitt’s living arrangement and declined to say whether the office was considering an investigation.
On Friday, ABC News reported that Mr. Pruitt’s daughter had also lived in the apartment, while she held an internship at the White House last summer. In its statement, the E.P.A. said, “The lease authorized use by the administrator and his immediate family, specifically including his spouse and children, and consistent with that provision of the lease his immediate family did stay there when they were in Washington, DC.”
Laura Ingraham Takes a Week Off as Advertisers Drop Her Show
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham announced on Friday that she was taking a week off following the decision of several companies to pull advertising from her show after she ridiculed a student survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.
“I’ll be off next week for Easter break with my kids. But fear not, we’ve got a great lineup of guest hosts to fill in for me,” Ms. Ingraham said on her show, “The Ingraham Angle.”
In response to an email, Fox News said that Ms. Ingraham’s break was a “preplanned vacation with her kids.”
The dispute began on Wednesday, when Ms. Ingraham shared an article about how the student, David Hogg, 17, had been rejected from several colleges, and she accused him of whining about it.
In response, Mr. Hogg, who has called for stricter gun regulations after the Feb. 14 shooting, called on advertisers to boycott Ms. Ingraham’s show.
He posted the names of her top advertisers on Twitter and urged his nearly 700,000 followers to call those companies. Several companies, including Hulu, Nutrish, Nestlé and TripAdvisor, have yanked their advertisements from Ms. Ingraham’s show.
“We’d like to confirm that we are no longer advertising on Laura Ingraham’s show and are monitoring all of our ad placements carefully,” Hulu said on Twitter.
“The decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values,” Wayfair, an online retailer of home goods, said in a statement. The company said it supported “open dialogue and debate.”
Consumers have increasingly used social media to demand that advertisers respond to controversies, particularly those involving Fox News hosts.
Consumers have increasingly used social media to demand that advertisers respond to controversies, particularly those involving Fox News hosts.
Last year, more than 50 brands pulled ads from “The O’Reilly Factor” after The New York Times reported on settlements that the show’s host, Bill O’Reilly, had made with women who accused him of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior, which contributed to his ouster.
On Thursday, Ms. Ingraham apologized to Mr. Hogg, saying he should be proud of his grade point average.
“On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” Ms. Ingraham wrote on Twitter.
But Mr. Hogg said Ms. Ingraham’s apology did not go far enough and seemed designed only to stop more advertisers from dropping her show.
“I will only accept your apology only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight,” Mr. Hogg said on Twitter. “It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.”
After Driving Streaming Music’s Rise, Spotify Aims to Cash In
Daniel Ek, a co-founder and the chief executive of Spotify, at an investor presentation in March. The Swedish company’s shares will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. Credit Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Spotify
Back in Spotify’s early days, when the company was just a dozen people in a small office in Stockholm, Daniel Ek, a co-founder, liked to compare it to Apple and Google.
It was 2008, and the traditional music industry was collapsing. Yet as Spotify introduced its streaming service in a handful of European countries, it clung to what must have seemed an impossible ambition: challenging the titans of Silicon Valley to become the world’s leading outlet for online music, with a hybrid free-and-paid model that made record companies nervous.
After a decade, the start-up from Sweden has proved itself a worthy adversary, with 157 million users around the world, 71 million of whom pay for subscriptions. That is about twice the number of its closest competitor, Apple, which finally entered the subscription game three years ago.
And on Tuesday, in a ritual of success for any start-up, Spotify’s shares will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation that could exceed $20 billion. Underscoring the company’s self-image as a disrupter, it has shunned the usual circus of an initial public offering in favor of a rarely used — and potentially risky — process known as a direct listing, in which no new stock is issued and insiders can begin selling their stash on Day 1.
Massachusetts, a Health Pioneer, Turns Its Focus to Drug Prices. It’s in for a Fight.
WASHINGTON — Massachusetts, which led the nation in expanding health insurance coverage, now wants to rein in the growth of prescription drug spending for low-income people on Medicaid, but its proposals have met an icy reaction from patients and drug companies.
The state has asked the Trump administration for permission to limit the number of drugs that will be covered in its Medicaid program, seeking to exclude “drugs with limited or inadequate evidence of clinical efficacy.”
The proposal has nationwide implications because many states are struggling with the costs of health care, including prescription drugs. Massachusetts officials say the decision on their request for a Medicaid waiver, which could set a national precedent if it is approved, will show just how serious President Trump is about his vow to bring down drug prices.
Consumer advocates and drug companies have mobilized a campaign to block the proposal, telling the administration that it would deprive Medicaid beneficiaries of access to innovative, lifesaving treatments.
Moreover, they say, it would be a radical departure from a “grand bargain” struck 28 years ago: Medicaid covers nearly all of a company’s prescription drugs if the company agrees to provide deep discounts to Medicaid.
Massachusetts officials said they were proud of coverage gains made since 2006, when the state adopted a health law that served in many ways as a model for the Affordable Care Act, signed four years later by President Barack Obama.
But drug spending in the Massachusetts health program has doubled in the last five years, to $2.2 billion, and it threatens to “crowd out important spending on health care and other critical programs,” the state said in asking the Trump administration for the Medicaid waiver.
In Massachusetts, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are combined into one program called MassHealth, which accounts for about 40 percent of the state budget.
Venting on Immigration, Trump Vows ‘No More DACA Deal’ and Threatens Nafta
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump, blaming Democrats and the Mexican government for an increasingly “dangerous” flow of illegal immigrants, unleashed a series of fiery tweets on Sunday in which he vowed “NO MORE DACA DEAL” and threatened to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Minutes after wishing the nation a happy Easter Sunday, Mr. Trump denounced “liberal” laws that he said were preventing Border Patrol agents from doing their jobs. He said that Republicans should use the “nuclear option” to sidestep Democratic opposition in the Senate and enact “tough laws NOW.”
It was unclear whether the president’s tweets represented any change in his immigration policy, or were just the sort of venting he is known to do after reading a newspaper article or seeing a television program. The president, who spent much of his holiday weekend golfing with supporters and watching television, was apparently reacting to a “Fox and Friends” segment on immigration that had aired minutes before.
Whatever his intention, Mr. Trump’s Twitter outburst captured the fickle tendencies that have driven his policy positions on immigration. On the one hand, he has suggested at times that he is open to extending citizenship to millions of undocumented people. On the other hand, he has denounced those who have entered the country illegally as brutal criminals and raged about lax enforcement that he said had allowed immigrants to pour into the country.