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Sofija Zlatanova’s New Book Release – “On Music Education, Psychology & Different Abilities” Provides Crucial Insight for Educators of the Future

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In “On Music Education, Psychology & Different Abilities”, Sofija Zlatanova
provides the frameworks and tools for educators to develop curricula as diverse and unique as their students.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 11, 2023, Sofija Zlatanova, an educator focused on psychology, music education, and working with students of different abilities, has released a new book to provide critical foundations for teachers of the future. In “On Music Education, Psychology & Different Abilities,” Zlatanova explores developing a multimedia, learner-centered curriculum that leverages music, art, and composition to reach students.

Zlatanova has spent years researching how to keep creative brains healthy while employing music as a method of treatment and learning. Her book discusses what it means to think critically about music education and how to apply that to working with students of different abilities. “For too long, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach has failed to serve many students,” Says Zlatanova.

“On Music Education, Psychology & Different Abilities” provides the crucial issues and foundations educators need to work with students of the future. Zlatanova argues that a one-size-fits-all curriculum will not suit the next generation of learners and has failed to serve many students. Instead, she offers strategies for tailoring teaching approaches to individual students using music, art, and composition.

The book covers analyzing composers and applying their techniques, discussing how to develop a multimedia, learner-centered curriculum, and employing music, art, and composition as behavior-teaching strategies. Zlatanova’s experience as an educator and researcher on psychology, music education, and different abilities provides a wealth of insight for teachers looking to evolve their practice.

“On Music Education, Psychology & Different Abilities” is essential reading for educators seeking to understand their students better and teach critical thinking skills that will benefit them for life. Zlatanova’s multifaceted approach to education is the kind of innovative thinking schools need to adopt to support students of all abilities.

On Music Education, Psychology, and Different Abilities is available as an eBook, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon and Worldwide.

About The Author:

Sofija Zlatanova is an award-winning viola performer, and a writer of fiction. Sofija advocates for inclusive music education. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she completed her graduate music studies at Berklee College of Music.

Sofija teaches music (piano, violin, and composition) at the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education, to children with different abilities, and who are twice-exceptional. As a philanthropist, she continuously shares her skills, and works on projects to support her community. She is a dog-lover, and in her spare time enjoys composing, and connecting with nature.

For more information, please visit www.sofijazlatanova.com

“Like” Sofija Zlatanova on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ZlatanovaSofija/

Connect with Sofija Zlatanova on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofija-zlatanova/


For media inquiries, or to request a review copy, please contact:

Sofija Zlatanova
info@zlatanova.com
857.262.3075

What Haunts Child Abuse Victims? The Memory, Study Finds

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For generations, our society has vacillated about how best to heal people who experienced terrible things in childhood.

Should these memories be unearthed, allowing their destructive power to dissipate? Should they be gently molded into something less painful? Or should they be left untouched?

Researchers from King’s College London and the City University of New York examined this conundrum by conducting an unusual experiment.

Researchers interviewed a group of 1,196 American adults repeatedly over 15 years about their levels of anxiety and depression. Unbeknown to the subjects, 665 of them had been selected because court records showed they had suffered mistreatment such as physical abuse, sexual abuse or neglect before age 12.

Not all of them told researchers that they had been abused, though — and that was linked to a big difference.

The 492 adults who reported having been mistreated and were in court records substantiating the abuse had significantly higher levels of depression and anxiety than a control group with no documented history of abuse, according to the study, which was published last week in JAMA Psychiatry. The 252 subjects who reported being abused without court records reflecting it also had higher levels.

But the 173 subjects who did not report having been abused, despite court records that show that it occurred, had no more distress than the general population.

The findings suggest how people frame and interpret events in their early childhood powerfully shapes their mental health as adults, said Dr. Andrea Danese, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King’s College London and one of the study’s joint authors.

“It goes back to almost the stoic message, that it’s what you make of the experience,” he said. “If you can change how you interpret the experience, if you feel more in control at present, then that is something that can improve mental health in the longer term.”

In a meta-analysis of 16 studies of childhood maltreatment published in 2019, Dr. Danese and colleagues found that 52 percent of people with records of childhood abuse did not report it in interviews with researchers, and 56 percent of those who reported it had no documented history of abuse.

This discrepancy could be partly because of problems in measurement — court records may not have all abuse history — and may also reflect that self-reporting of abuse is influenced by a person’s levels of anxiety and depression, Dr. Danese said.

“There are many reasons why people may, in some ways, forget those experiences, and other reasons why others might misinterpret some of the experiences as being neglect or abuse,” he said.

But even considering these caveats, he said, it was notable that adults who had a documented history of having been abused but did not report it — because they had no memory of the events, interpreted them differently or chose not to share those memories with interviewers — seemed healthier.

“If the meaning you give to these experiences is not central to how you remember your childhood so you don’t feel like you need to report it, then you are more likely to have better mental health over time,” he said.

Traumatic childhood experiences have been the subject of some of psychiatry’s most pitched battles. Sigmund Freud postulated early in his career that many of his patients’ behaviors indicated a history of childhood sexual abuse but later backtracked, attributing them to subconscious desires.

In the 1980s and 1990s, therapists used techniques like hypnosis and age regression to help clients uncover memories of childhood abuse. Those methods receded under a barrage of criticism from mainstream psychiatry.

Recently, many Americans have embraced therapies designed to manage traumatic memories, which have shown to be effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Experts increasingly advocate screening patients for adverse childhood experiences as an important step in providing physical and mental health treatment.

The new findings in JAMA Psychiatry suggest therapy that seeks to alleviate depression and anxiety by trying to unearth repressed memories is ineffective, said Dr. Danese, who works at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London.

But he cautioned that the results of the study should not be interpreted as endorsing the avoidance of distressing memories, which could make them “scarier” in the long term. Instead, they point to the promise of therapies that seek to “reorganize” and moderate memories.

“It’s not about deleting the memory, but having the memory and being more in control of that so that the memory feels less scary,” he said.

Memory has always posed a challenge in the field of child protection because many abuse cases involve children below the age of 3, when lasting memories begin to form, said David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study.

In treating people with histories of having been abused, he said, clinicians must rely on sketchy, incomplete and changing accounts. “All we have is their memories, so it’s not like we have a choice,” he said.

He warned against concluding that forgotten maltreatment has no lingering effect. Early abuse may emerge through what he described as “residues” — difficulty in modulating emotions, feelings of worthlessness or, in the case of sexual abuse victims, the urge to provide sexual gratification to others.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a prominent skeptic of the reliability of memories of abuse, noted that the study stops short of another conclusion that could be supported by the data: Forgetting about abuse might be a healthy response.

“They could have said, people who don’t remember in some ways are better off, and maybe you don’t want to tamper with them,” she said. “They don’t say that, and that, to me, is of great interest.”

How to Navigate Dubrovnik Without the Crowds

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The Pile and Ploce Gates, the two entrances into Dubrovnik’s Old Town, once had drawbridges that lifted during the overnight hours, forcing visitors wanting to enter to wait outside its stone walls until morning. The bridges no longer lift, yet the bottlenecks of morning visitors remain.

This compact, seaside city in Croatia has drawn millions of travelers from around the globe for years. Its popularity grew when HBO’s “Game of Thrones” used it as a primary location and visitors soon overwhelmed the city, particularly in the summer. Officials have introduced measures to manage the crowds without limiting the number of visitors, but according to the Croatian National Tourist Board, this year is on pace to become the city’s busiest ever.

Yet a trip to “Pearl of the Adriatic” need not require jostling with other tourists, bumping about like a stream of rambunctious salmon. Planning takes artful timing, minor sacrifices and a bit of luck. Here are six ways to start.

Dubrovnik is a mainstay on the itineraries of cruise ships navigating the Mediterranean, and 377,000 passengers disembarked last year, according to the city’s Port Authority. This year that number could jump to 500,000, as up to five ships are expected to arrive daily during the high season.

Every cruise ship’s arrival sends an avalanche of humanity barreling toward Old Town, mostly between 7 and 9 a.m. In this surge, a few hundred to several thousand people congregate at the two gates, waiting in lines of up to two hours to enter the Old Town, and then typically disperse to view the city’s biggest draws — its ramparts, the main street, or Stradun, or scenery related to “Game of Thrones.”

To avoid joining this ebb and flow of cruise ship passengers, monitor the port’s schedule online. The Port Authority’s schedule and sites like Cruise Dig offer cruise ships’ arrival times as well as the potential number of travelers disembarking. The number of passengers arriving is more important than the number of ships.

A two-hour buffer should be enough to avoid the crowd at the gates, the Jesuit Stairs (best known from the “Walk of Shame” scene in “Game of Thrones”) or the city’s other major attractions.

The city also offers Dubrovnik Visitors, an online resource that estimates how crowded the Old Town is at any moment, and also uses machine learning to forecast visitor numbers during future dates.

The city’s streets empty somewhat in the late afternoon. Day-trippers shuffle out while other visitors rush to the city walls for selfies or even the occasional marriage proposal in front of the setting sun. The golden hour is a better time to take in the Old Town, with a stop by Onofrio’s Fountains before getting lost in the narrow passageways and streets.

If you do need a photo you can hashtag, check the passages and stairways below the walls for unique shots; there will be much less jostling for space.

But don’t skip the city’s fortifications entirely. Undulating terra-cotta roofs rippling off into the distant, glistening Adriatic Sea remain a vista unique to Dubrovnik. It is best experienced as soon as the walls open at 8 a.m., before the crowds and before the sun rises high. A visit is 35 euros ($38), but the Dubrovnik Pass, which costs the same, offers access to the city walls as well as discounts to other attractions and free public transport.

One can find respite from the congestion by ducking into one of the city’s two monasteries and their courtyards. Each offers stone walkways lined by arches, with lush greenery at the center and history everywhere. They are open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The 14th-century Franciscan Monastery, just past the Pile Gate, features elegant pillared columns encircling a courtyard with a small fountain and orange and palm trees (entrance: €6). Next door is the oldest operating pharmacy in Europe, with formulas, tools and tincture bottles on display.

The Dominican Monastery, closer to the Ploce Gate, offers a grander version of the same charms, housed within a larger complex blended into the city’s fortifications (€5).

At both monasteries, the atmosphere encourages hushed tones and meditative silence, perhaps good spots to sip water while contemplating Dubrovnik’s knack for simultaneously preserving and commodifying its historic beauty.

Veteran travelers often steal away to the Gruz and Lapad neighborhoods to find better cuisine, easier access to nature and fewer crowds. These neighborhoods are the de facto urban heart of Dubrovnik, where many of the approximately 40,000 locals actually live, and can be reached from the Old Town by a 30-minute walk or a 10-minute bus or cab ride.

The waterfront in Gruz offers relaxing eateries as well as a nightclub, Klub Dubina, and local craft brewery, the Dubrovnik Beer Company. For traditional seafood dishes under a vaulted ceiling, have anything grilled at Glorijet. One of the city’s more inventive vegetarian restaurants, Urban & Veggie, offers homemade gnocchi with cashew Parmesan and refreshing lemon tarts.

Across from Gruz, Lapad’s lush greenery includes the Velika and Mala Petka Forest Park. A promenade along the sea wall reveals several improvised swimming areas and a beach.

The neighborhood eateries here offer variety, experimentation and unique experiences. Ponat Beach Bar has a slick combination of seaside bites and drinks that can stretch your night beyond midnight. Or have a coffee or a nightcap in Cave Bar More — which claustrophobic visitors should probably skip.

What’s the antithesis of Dubrovnik’s imposing city walls and terra-cotta roofs? An island covered in pine, cypress and olive trees, just offshore.

Lokrum Island, a 10-minute ferry ride away, is one of the few spots even locals visit to beat the summer crowds. The island has a visitor center, bars and restaurants, but also botanical gardens and peacocks roaming the remnants of an abandoned medieval monastery.

The more adventurous can head to FKK Rocks, at the island’s southeast corner, to partake in Croatia’s long history of nudist beaches (bring a thick towel — the rocks can be uncomfortable on bare skin).

In the visitor center, one can find a “comfortable” seat on the original Iron Throne from “Game of Thrones,” given by HBO to the city of Dubrovnik.

Ferries leave the Old Town port about every 30 minutes (€7). Entry to the island, €27.

Only 50 of Croatia’s 1,244 islands have permanent residents, leaving most of the truly unspoiled nature offshore. The Elaphiti Islands, six miles northwest of the Old Town, gives visitors and city residents alike a close-up view of nature. The eight islands and five islets include cozy coves and secluded beaches that trump most of the mainland’s swimming options. (In Croatia, the coastline is public access.)

Three of the islands — Sipan, Lopud and Kolocep — have modest villages with few residents. After the bustle of Dubrovnik, time here feels much slower.

Renting a vessel offers the best chance to create a one-day island-hopping itinerary, and most have skippers available for an additional charge. Prices vary, a group of four can expect to pay about €70 per person for a smaller skipper-less motorboat, with costs increasing along with the size of the vessel. Some companies, like Dubrovnik Boats, offer either custom or prepackaged tours, and craft of various sizes.

Kayaks are also available for rent, with most tour outfits located at Sulic Beach, by the Pile Gate. Again, prices vary, depending on whether you’re joining a group tour or going solo, but expect to spend around €40 for about four hours out on the water.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

Opinion | AI Needs to Progress to Jumpstart Our Economic Productivity

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The workers were furious. Believing that new mechanical looms threatened their jobs, they broke into factories, seized machinery, brought it into the street and set it afire, all with widespread public support, even tacitly from the authorities.

That was in 1675. And those English textile workers were neither first nor last in the long procession of worriers about the potential harm to jobs from labor-saving devices. Several centuries earlier, the adoption of the fulling mill caused an uproar among workers forced to find other occupations. Almost exactly 60 years ago, Life magazine warned that the advent of automation would make “jobs go scarce” — instead, employment boomed.

Now, the launch of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. platforms has unleashed a tsunami of hyperbolic fretting, this time about the fate of white-collar workers. Will paralegals — or maybe even a chunk of lawyers — be rendered superfluous? Will A.I. diagnose some medical conditions faster and better than doctors? Will my next guest essay be ghostwritten by a machine? A breathless press has already begun chronicling the first job losses.

Unlike most past rounds of technological improvement, the advent of A.I. has also birthed a small armada of non-economic fears, from disinformation to privacy to the fate of democracy itself. Some suggest in seriousness that A.I. could have a more devastating impact on humanity than nuclear war.

While acknowledging the need for substantive guardrails, I’ll leave those valid concerns to others. When it comes to the economy, including jobs, the reassuring lessons of history (albeit with a few warning signals) are inescapable. At the moment, the problem is not that we have too much technology; it’s that we have too little.

We’ve had forms of artificial intelligence, broadly defined, for millenniums. The abacus, thought to have been invented in Babylonia more than 4,000 years ago, replaced more laborious methods of mathematical calculation, saving time and therefore reducing work.

When I began my career in finance in the early 1980s, we had only hand-held calculators to help with our numerical analysis, which we painstakingly wrote in pencil on large sheets of paper (hence the term “spreadsheets”) and which were then typed by a secretarial pool. Any changes meant redoing the entire spreadsheet. Now, all that happens with the click of a mouse.

Less than three decades ago, library-type research could require hours of combing through dusty volumes; now, it necessitates a few strokes on a keyboard. Not surprisingly, the number of librarians has been flat since 1990, while total employment has grown by more than 40 percent.

Other job categories have almost completely disappeared. When was the last time you talked to a telephone operator? Or were conveyed by a manned elevator? In the place of these and so many other defunct tasks, a vast array of new categories has been created. A recent study co-authored by M.I.T. economist David Autor found that approximately 60 percent of jobs in 2018 were in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.

And so the Great American Jobs Machine ground on. In the decade after Life magazine decried the robot invasion, the United States created 20.2 million jobs, and today, the unemployment rate sits at 3.6 percent, a hair above its 50-year low. Of course, the number of Americans employed in finance has boomed, even as computers, Excel and other technologies have made them far more productive.

Higher worker productivity translates into higher wages and cheaper goods, which become more purchasing power, which stimulates more consumption, which induces more production, which creates new jobs. That, essentially, is how growth has always happened.

This makes A.I. a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. We can only achieve lasting economic progress and rising standards of living by increasing how much each worker produces. Technology — whether in the form of looms or robots or artificial intelligence — is central to that objective.

Generative A.I. — as dazzling and scary as it can be because of its potential to be a particularly transformative innovation — is just another step in the continuum of progress. Were our ancestors any less startled when they first witnessed other exceptional inventions, like a telephone transmitting voice or a light bulb illuminating a room?

In the heyday of commercial innovation — between 1920 and 1970 — productivity rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate. Since then, except for a brief interval of acceleration between 1995 and 2005 (the modern computer revolution), the annual rate of growth has averaged a modest 1.6 percent. To pessimists, that reflects their view that the most impactful technological advances are behind us. To me, that means full speed ahead on A.I.

What constitutes “full speed ahead” remains to be seen. For all those who believe that A.I. will prove revolutionary, there are others more skeptical that it will prove a game changer. My best guess is that it will help nudge productivity upward but not back to its halcyon days of the last century.

To be sure, the benefits of productivity growth don’t always reach workers as fully and efficiently as we’d like. Recently, even the meager productivity growth has largely not filtered down to the workers. Since 1990, labor efficiency has risen by 84 percent, but average real (adjusted for inflation) hourly compensation has increased by 56 percent.

That foregone worker compensation has largely gone into corporate profits, fueling a stock market boom and record income inequality. Why the disconnect? There are a variety of contributors, from declining union membership to imports to anti-labor practices by companies, like noncompete clauses for hourly workers.

Government can help ameliorate these dislocations. For more than a century, redistribution — yes, that can be a dirty word in America — has been a necessary part of managing the fruits of the industrial and technological improvements.

The progressive income tax, introduced in 1913, was designed, in part, to offset the vast income inequality generated during the Gilded Age. More factory improvements and more income inequality in the 1920s helped stimulate a variety of New Deal policies, from additional protection for labor to the introduction of Social Security.

Today, we can easily see the consequences of Washington’s failure to hold up its end of the bargain. Disgruntled white factory workers in the Midwest with stagnant or falling real wages became supporters of Donald Trump (despite the fact that his policies favored the wealthy). With only 22 percent of Americans saying our country is on the right track, America feels more divided politically and socially than at any time in my 70-year lifetime.

We did a lousy job of preparing Americans for the transition from a manufacturing economy to one dominated by services. We have to do a better job this time.

If artificial intelligence proves as transformative as its acolytes (and some antagonists) believe, we could face a vast need for better education and training. The impact will not be just on factory workers but on Americans across industries and up and down the employment chain, from financial analysts and coders to graphic designers and customer service agents and call-center workers.

A recent report from Goldman Sachs, among the most bullish of the techno-bulls, concluded that A.I. can help return our productivity growth rate to the halcyon days of the mid-20th century. I, for one, am fervently hoping that the Goldman report proves correct and that A.I. unleashes a new era of technological and economic progress — and that we take the right steps to be sure the rewards are widely shared.

Russia-Ukraine Live Updates: Putin Held Meeting With Prigozhin, Kremlin Says

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ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said on Monday that the European Union should open the way for Turkey to join the bloc before Turkey allows Sweden to join NATO, adding a surprising new condition that could further stall the military alliance’s efforts to expand.

Mr. Erdogan’s latest demand came a day before the opening of NATO’s two-day annual summit, where leaders, including President Biden, had hoped to secure unanimous approval from member states to allow Sweden to become the 32nd member.

That outcome now appears increasingly unlikely, with Mr. Erdogan posing the main obstacle to Sweden’s membership.

“First, clear the way for Turkey in the European Union, then we will clear the way for Sweden as we did for Finland,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters before traveling to the NATO summit.

Leaders of the European Union and NATO member states are not likely to respond positively, since they are separate organizations that have many overlapping members but entirely different purposes. Turkey applied to join the European Union in 1987, but there has been scarcely any progress in its bid since 2016, when the European Parliament voted to suspend accession talks while criticizing a vast Turkish government crackdown on political opponents after a failed coup against Mr. Erdogan.

NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Monday that he supports Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union, but that it was not among the conditions set by officials from Turkey, Sweden and Finland last year at a NATO summit in Madrid.

“We need to remember that what we agreed in Madrid was a specific list of conditions that Sweden has to meet to be a full member of the alliance, and Sweden has met these conditions,” Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters in Lithuania.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, which is a member of both the European Union and NATO, said that the two issues should not be linked.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for NATO membership,” Mr. Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is unrelated, and so I don’t think it should be taken as a related issue.”

Sweden applied to join NATO last year, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. All NATO nations must agree to admit new members, a rule that has given Mr. Erdogan tremendous leverage to demand concessions.

Turkey has accused Sweden of providing a permissive environment for dissidents whom Turkey considers terrorists, including pro-Kurdish activists and members of a religious group that Turkey has accused of planning the 2016 coup attempt.

In recent months, Sweden has made efforts to meet Turkey’s demands, amending its Constitution, passing new counterterrorism legislation and agreeing to extradite several Turks who stand accused of crimes in Turkey. But Swedish courts have blocked other extraditions, and Swedish officials have said that they cannot override their country’s free-speech protections.

Mr. Erdogan has continued to say that Sweden must do more.

A new complication arose late last month after a man publicly burned a Quran at a protest in Stockholm on a major Muslim holiday. Mr. Erdogan criticized Sweden for permitting the protest and said that the Swedish authorities needed to fight Islamophobia, even though that had not been among the issues Sweden had agreed with Turkey to address.

Hungary is the only other NATO member that has yet to approve Sweden’s bid, but Hungarian officials have said that if Turkey’s position changes, they would not obstruct the process. Finland applied at the same time as Sweden, but overcame Turkey’s initial objections and joined the alliance in April.

By linking Turkey’s drive to join the European Union with Sweden’s joining NATO, Mr. Erdogan threw another wrench into the alliance’s negotiations less than 24 hours before NATO leaders are expected to convene in Vilnius, Lithuania, for their annual summit. On Sunday, President Biden spoke with Mr. Erdogan and told him of “his desire to welcome Sweden into NATO as soon as possible,” according to a terse account of the call provided by the White House.

Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the United States continues to support Turkey’s aspirations to join the European Union, adding that the bid was a matter between those parties.

“Our focus is on Sweden, which is ready to join the NATO alliance,” he said.

Before traveling to the summit, Mr. Erdogan said again on Monday that Sweden could not expect to join until it had met all of Turkey’s demands with respect to terrorism.

“Nobody should expect compromise nor understanding from me,” he said.

Gulsin Harman and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Hunter Biden prosecutor says Justice Dept didn’t interfere in probe

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By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The federal prosecutor overseeing the criminal case against U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on Monday said the Justice Department never impeded him from bringing charges, appearing to debunk claims made by an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower.

Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss in a letter to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham denied allegations that he ever formally sought permission from Attorney General Merrick Garland to be designated as special counsel – a status that would have allowed him to bring federal charges in any district across the nation against Hunter Biden.

“I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” wrote Weiss, who was appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump.

“Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment … which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney. I was assured that I would be granted this authority if it proved necessary.”

Weiss’ office last month revealed that it was charging Hunter Biden with two misdemeanor tax charges, to which the president’s son is expected to plead guilty later this month. Hunter Biden also has agreed to enter into a pretrial diversion program to avoid facing a more serious felony count of possessing a firearm while he was using illegal drugs.

Republicans have questioned why Weiss did not bring more aggressive felony charges.

Their criticism has been fueled in part by claims from Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal supervisory agent who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation.

Shapley in an interview with lawmakers claimed that the Justice Department repeatedly stonewalled the probe, starting during the Trump administration and continuing through to the present.

Most notably, Shapley said investigators uncovered evidence of more serious tax crimes that could only be pursued in either Washington, D.C., or California, but not in Delaware.

Shapley said that when Weiss sought permission from Garland to be designated as special counsel, so he could bring charges from anywhere in the country, his request was denied.

Garland has denied the claim, telling reporters last month that Weiss made no such request and stating that Weiss was given “complete authority.”

Hunter Biden’s attorney has also denied that his client received any special treatment.

Weiss, in his letter on Monday, confirmed Garland’s prior comments on the case, telling lawmakers he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Graff)

The New York Times to Disband Its Sports Department

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The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the change to the newsroom as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

The staff of The Athletic will now provide the bulk of the coverage of sporting events, athletes and leagues for Times readers and, for the first time, articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to two or more of The Times’s bundle of products.

Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs were planned, Mr. Kahn and Ms. Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by the fall.

When The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.

Last November, The Times named Steven Ginsberg, a top editor at The Washington Post, the executive editor of The Athletic. In June, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 reporters and moved more than 20 others to new jobs. Its leaders said the outlet would no longer assign at least one beat reporter to each sports team.

The acquisition of The Athletic had raised questions about the future of The Times’s sports department, which has included numerous distinguished journalists. The Sports of the Times column was started by John Kieran in 1927, and would later include a distinguished group of writers, including Robert Lipsyte, William Rhoden, Harvey Araton, George Vecsey and Ira Berkow.

Three Sports of the Times columnists, Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson, have won Pulitzer Prizes for their sports writing. Mr. Daley wrote more than 10,000 columns for The Times over 32 years. (Another sports reporter, John Branch, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his feature on a deadly avalanche in Washington State and Josh Haner won the feature photography prize in 2014 for documenting the recovery of a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.)

In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared.

On Sunday, a group of nearly 30 members of The Times’s sports desk sent a letter to Mr. Kahn and A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, chastising the company for leaving its sports staff “twisting in the wind” since the purchase of The Athletic.

Mr. Sulzberger and the company’s chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, wrote in an email to the staff on Monday that the company’s goal since acquiring The Athletic was to become “a global leader in sports journalism.”

An Art-Filled Swiss Idyll in Lausanne and the Joux Valley

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The museum has a collection of more than 10,000 pieces, dating from 1816. Many are by Swiss artists, including the Giacomettis, father and son. When I visited, one floor featured a large, temporary exhibition of more than 100 paintings by the Swiss painter Gustav Buchet, an important figure in the avant-garde movements in early-20th-century Switzerland. I was captivated, though, by the more realist paintings of François Bocion, who frequently painted working boatmen along Lake Geneva in the 19th century. Bocion was obsessed with capturing the elusive beauty of light on water, and his obsession is our reward.

The museum isn’t strictly parochial, though. It also owns and displays boldface names, too: Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Rodin, and there is an exhibition by a pioneer of textile art, Magdalena Abakanowicz, through late September.

The newest addition to Plateforme 10 caps the far end of the plaza: an enormous white cube, its only windows appearing where the cube seems to fracture. The building was designed by the Portuguese architects Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus and opened in June 2022, along with the plaza. The cube houses the quarter’s two other museums, the Photo Elysée, the canton’s museum dedicated to photography; and Mudac, its museum of design and contemporary applied arts.

Inside, the ground level of this enormous block manages both a solidity and a tent-like airiness. Downstairs, an interactive photography studio was the best of museum education: Visitors can dress up with props, take digital photos and then edit them on a light table — all to teach concepts of framing and composition.

The photo exhibitions were at their best in the Elysée’s contribution to a districtwide exhibition on trains in art, showing photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nan Goldin and others. Many photos reminded how trains can represent escape and adventure, but also a Hail Mary for the desperate. Black-and-white shots of war refugees piling onto trains, taken 70 years ago, felt like they could have been taken last month.

F1: British Grand Prix Time, TV, Results

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Lando Norris took the lead early and then he took the fight right to Max Verstappen. But a British Grand Prix that offered some early drama at Silverstone on Sunday eventually ended in the most predictable way possible: with Verstappen taking the lead back, pushing his Red Bull far out in front, and leaving everyone else racing for second place.

Verstappen earned his sixth straight victory, his eighth win of the season and his first at the British Grand Prix with yet another dominant day. The victory extended Red Bull’s record to perfect 10 wins in 10 races this season, and — combined with a win on the final day of last season — let the team equal McLaren’s Formula 1 record of 11 wins in a row, set in 1988.

But it was Norris, in a McLaren, who felt like the day’s biggest winner after holding off Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes in an all-British battle for second place.

Norris’s result was the first podium finish for McLaren this season, and a welcome reward for his impressive performance holding off Hamilton, a seven-time world champion, in the final laps.

Hamilton tried everything to get around the 23-year-old Norris as the laps fell away. Feints inside. Sweeping turns out wide. Close-quarters maneuvering. But none of Hamilton’s experience or his skills could get him around a remarkable defensive drive by Norris. It was the first time two British drivers had stood on the podium at Silverstone since 1999. McLaren’s second car, driven by Oscar Piastri, was right behind in fourth place.

The most intriguing driver at Silverstone, the one teams and fans alike wanted to get a look at all week, was a fictional one: Sonny Hayes.

That’s the name of the character the actor Brad Pitt will play in a new Formula 1 film that spent the week shooting scenes and meeting people at the track — even setting up a fake garage and a fake hospitality trailer — as part of an effort at gathering intelligence, advice and race footage.

Teams seemed eager to get close to the project. Lewis Hamilton is part of the film’s production apparatus, Red Bull’s Christian Horner met with the filmmakers on Friday, and Mercedes even helped with the design of the cars of Pitt’s fictional Apex racing team.

“We’ve been involved pretty early,” Toto Wolff of Mercedes told reporters last week. “When we had the first discussions, we sent Brad to a driving school in France, going through the Formula cars from Formula 4 all the way up, and we tried to be helpful with the narrative. Lewis is an executive producer, so he wanted to make sure when the movie comes out, it’s as realistic as possible.”

Pitt and his co-star, Damson Idris, were around the grid all week, and several windows were carved out of the tight racing schedule to allow for filming on the track itself.

  • “I did what I could. I brought the fight to Max for as long as possible.” — Norris, on taking the lead at the start before surrendering it and focusing his efforts on protecting second place.

  • “We had a terrible start so we need to look into why that was.” — Verstappen, unwilling to be looking at the back of another car for even a single lap.

  • “That’s where I started, so to see them back on top warms my heart.” — Lewis Hamilton, a former McLaren driver, on seeing his old team on the podium.

Verstappen’s lead over his teammate Sergio Pérez, who rallied from another poor Saturday (he qualified in 15th) with another strong Sunday (he finished sixth), is now 99 points.

It also ensured that Verstappen would carry his points lead into September even if he stops showing up at races. (Spoiler: He will show up at all the races.)

The Elite Circle Clarence Thomas Entered That Led to the Supreme Court

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“David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone,” the Thomases said in the letter, which was reviewed by The Times. The Thomases brought along their dog, Petey, who played with the Sokols’ dog, Bodie. They wrote: “Bodie showed Petey how to be a ranch dog, without a leash! LIBERTY!” Supreme Court

The trip, they concluded, was “pure heaven for all of us!”

The Clarence Thomas origin story begins in a dirt-floor shack in Pin Point, a tiny community founded by formerly enslaved people in the salt marsh lands outside Savannah.

When he is 20, after a brief spell in a Roman Catholic seminary, it continues at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he is one of a small group of young Black men who integrate the school. There, in the spring of 1971, his senior year, he receives a letter from Yale Law School. He worries that the thin envelope means a rejection. But one of the nation’s most elite law schools wants him.

“My heart raced and my spirits lifted,” Justice Thomas wrote in his autobiography.

At Yale, he was one of only 12 Black students in his law school class, admitted the year the law school introduced an affirmative action plan. His white classmates viewed him as a token, he felt — a belief in the corrosive effects of affirmative action that was only deepened by his failure to win the law firm job he had dreamed of.

“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a new father, with a “swirling combination of frustration, of some disappointments, of some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I would repay my student loans, how I would feed a young child, where I would live.”

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