Meta is ending its fact-checking program

Meta will stop using third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram, a policy once instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across the tech company’s social media platforms. Meta will instead rely on users to add notes to posts that may be false or misleading.

The reversal is a stark sign of how Meta is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency. The company recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, also said on Monday that it had added to the company’s board Dana White, the head of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump.

Zuckerberg said that the shift would begin in the U.S. in the coming months. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” he said. He conceded that the decision would result in more “bad stuff” on the platforms, calling it a “trade-off” for the reduction in the number of “innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Reactions: Several digital rights groups condemned the decision, even as Donald Trump and his conservative allies praised the change. The president-elect has acknowledged that the decision was “probably” related to threats he had made against Meta and Zuckerberg.

Could the U.S. take Greenland — or Canada?

In a rambling news conference yesterday, Trump refused to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal that the U.S. built more than a century ago or to compel Denmark to sell Greenland.

His desire to expand the U.S. footprint is in step with his mind-set of making whatever he controls as big as possible, going back to his series of real estate acquisitions in the late 1980s, and he has suggested that Greenland could be necessary for the national security of the U.S. “It might be that you’ll have to do something,” he said.

It was not clear how serious the president-elect was in making some of his comments. At one point, he suggested that his administration would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Canada: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reacted angrily to Trump’s threat to use “economic force” against Canada to acquire it, writing on social media: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”

Panama: Few appeared to be taking Trump’s threats very seriously, but Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, stressed that the canal’s sovereignty was “nonnegotiable,” saying: “Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way.”

Related: The second Trump presidency has unprecedented potential for conflicts of interest across deals in real estate, cryptocurrency and sports.

Scores of people died in an earthquake in China

At least 126 people have died and nearly 200 were injured in a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Dingri County, near one of Tibet’s most historic cities, in western China, state media reported. The quake was the country’s deadliest since December 2023, when 151 people were killed in a magnitude 6.2 temblor in the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.

China’s state broadcaster said that at least 1,000 homes had been damaged, and rescue efforts were being hampered by logistical challenges. The remoteness of the area, along the Himalayan border with Nepal, made the delivery of resources difficult.

On the ground: With temperatures in the region reaching as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 Celsius), rescue workers had a short window to locate survivors.

MORE TOP NEWS

Snakes vie for many of the same resources and spaces as people do, often with dire consequences. Venomous snakes kill about 120,000 people a year, most of them in parts of Africa far from clinics and populated by people too poor to afford proper care.

The problem was mostly ignored until recently, but scientists are now trying to better quantify it. Read more.

Lives lived: Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk trio behind gentle hits like “Puff the Magic Dragon,” died at 86.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

• Turn the page: Writers, artists and a social worker shared their favorite tips to help you start and maintain a journal.

• The one who got away: Fleeing fraud charges, Samuele Landi went to sea and evaded extradition treaties. He took advantage of all the offshore world had to offer.

• A dangerous byproduct: Mining operations in the Roman Empire led to widespread lead exposure. It might have been the world’s first case of widespread industrial pollution.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Where will you go this year?

England will honor the author Jane Austen on the 250th anniversary of her birth. New York City will celebrate four major museum reopenings. In Koh Samui, Thailand, fans of “The White Lotus” can walk the sandy beaches and jungle where the upcoming season was filmed. And exploring Angola’s tropical beaches, waterfalls and national parks has never been easier.

All of these places are our Travel desk’s “52 Places to Go in 2025” this year. Read the list, and mark off the destinations you’d most like to go.

As international condemnation mounts over the Israeli military’s arrest late last month of the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, the Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had new evidence that militant groups had used the hospital as a command center.

The military released footage of what it said was an interrogation of one of the more than 240 militants it had arrested in raiding the hospital, saying it backed up Israel’s allegations that Hamas and other armed groups deliberately embed themselves in hospitals in violation of international law.

The New York Times was not able to independently verify the claims made in the video, or to determine the circumstances under which the detainee made the admission. Israel has detained many Gazans in Sde Teiman, an army base in southern Israel, where many have been held in demeaning conditions and in which former detainees described beatings and other abuse. The Israeli military has denied accusations of systematic abuse there.

The short clip the military released shows a young man who identifies himself as Anas Muhammad Faiz al-Sharif, 21, explaining that he had been a cleaning supervisor at Kamal Adwan Hospital, as well as a member of Hamas’s military wing since 2021. In the video, he says that operatives from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups operated out of the hospital, using it for weapons transfers and distribution, patrols and as an observation post, because they considered it a safe haven that could not be directly targeted by the Israeli military.

Hospitals are protected under international law, even if they provide medical care for combatants, but if they are used for other acts that are “harmful to the enemy,” that can make them legitimate targets for military action. Still, the military must weigh the expected military advantage of any action against the expected harm to civilians, and civilian harm must not be disproportional.

Israel has raided Kamal Adwan before and attacked areas in the vicinity of the hospital. In October, the military detained or expelled most of the hospital’s staff members during a raid that lasted for days. Before his arrest in December, the hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, said that the hospital had been attacked many times in recent months.

Hamas did not respond to requests for comment on the Israeli claims about its operations.

Doctors and medical workers around the world, including in Israel, have condemned the raid on Kamal Adwan, and particularly the arrest of Dr. Abu Safiya. The hospital had been a main provider of medical care for the thousands of people who have remained in northern Gaza through an intensive Israeli military campaign over the last three months to quell what Israel says has been a Hamas resurgence there.

Dr. Abu Safiya was vocal in his protests of Israeli military activity throughout the war and frequently shined a light on the suffering in northern Gaza, in recent months especially.

In the days after the raid, the Israeli military confirmed the arrest of Dr. Abu Safiya, saying he was being questioned as a suspect and accusing him of being a member of Hamas. Because the group has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, all kinds of public services, including health care, are to varying degrees entwined with Hamas.

Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an Israeli nonprofit group, said on Sunday that the Israeli military had refused the group’s efforts to send a lawyer to see Dr. Abu Safiya to evaluate his state and the conditions of his detention. “Despite our urgent requests to send an attorney, the military says he’s barred from lawyer visits” until Jan. 10, the group said.

The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Saturday that Kamal Adwan Hospital remains “completely out of function” and that the organization has “received no updates on the safety and well-being of its director” since his detention. “We continue to urge Israel to release him,” Dr. Tedros said, adding that “attacks on hospitals and health professionals must end.”

On Monday, medical workers calling for the release of Dr. Abu Safiya and an end to attacks on hospitals and health workers in Gaza protested in cities around the United States and the world, including San Francisco, New York, Boston, Quebec and London. The rallies were organized by Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of health care workers based in Michigan and founded in 2023, which has demanded that Dr. Abu Safiya and his colleagues be released.

But the Israeli military has long insisted that Hamas and other militant groups have deliberately embedded themselves among civilians in violation of international law, and there is no indication that its campaign in Gaza will let up, despite international outrage. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the military’s chief of staff, in remarks to soldiers in northern Gaza on Monday, said of Hamas: “They understand that this is becoming unbearable. And I’m telling you — we won’t stop.”

A civil war in Sudan that has killed 150,000 people and forced more than 11 million others from their homes, by some estimates, prompted the U.S. government on Tuesday to declare that a genocide had been perpetrated by one of the war’s main antagonists, the ethnic Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces.

The war, which has drawn in foreign countries and a host of armed groups, now threatens to spill over Sudan’s borders. After 21 months of fighting, thousands have been killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, countless women and girls have been subjected to sexual violence, and millions are hungry, in the world’s first officially declared famine since 2020.

So many people have been uprooted that the United Nations says Sudan is now home to the world’s largest displacement crisis — a “living nightmare,” in the words of Amy Pope, director general of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.

Genocide Old and New

The Sudanese army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, were once allies. In 2021, they worked together to stage a military coup. But they later split after failing to merge their forces.

In April 2023, they went to war, with gun battles raging in the capital, Khartoum.

The R.S.F., as the Rapid Support Forces is known, is composed of the remnants of another militia, the Janjaweed, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people two decades ago in the western Darfur region of Sudan. Those killings led to genocide charges at the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019.

On Tuesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said that the R.S.F., and allied militias had committed new acts of genocide in Darfur in 2023. The target, officials said, was the Masalit people, a non-Arab ethnic minority in Sudan, where the population and the armed forces are predominantly Arabs.

In July 2023, a mass grave was uncovered, holding the bodies of 87 people, most of them Masalit who rights groups said had likely been killed by the R.S.F. There have also been reports of sexual violence, torture and killings of Masalit people.

Death toll estimates for the war vary widely. Last year — before the recent waves of fighting — the American envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, said the number could be as high as 150,000. In January, 2024, an independent panel of experts submitted a report to the U.N. that said that in December 2023 alone, some 10,000 to 15,000 people had been killed in R.S.F. massacres in El Geneina, a city in West Darfur.

As of last July, at least 33,000 people had been injured in the fighting, according to the World Health Organization. That figure has very likely increased.

Mass Displacement

More than 11.5 million Sudanese people — almost one-quarter of the country’s population — have been displaced from their homes, many of them repeatedly, including 8.7 million who fled during the current war, according to a U.N. report released in this week. Since the fighting began, over 3.3 million people have crossed Sudan’s borders into neighboring countries, among them Egypt, Chad and South Sudan.

More than half of all those displaced are children, the report said. Many are living in dire conditions, with little food or water. Some refugees living at a camp at Adré, across the border in Chad, sleep on the ground, even through the rain.

The catastrophe grew still worse last October, when over 135,000 people in one state, El Gezira in eastern Sudan, were displaced over the span of 10 days by a brutal surge of violence in the region, the United Nations reported.

“Words cannot describe this kind of thing,” said Mohamed Ahmed, deputy head of the Doctors Without Borders mission in Sudan. “It’s really a feeling of desperation.”

Many of the people fleeing Gezira ended up in another state, Gedaref, in the country’s southeast, where Mr. Ahmed has been working. The condition in which many children arrive at his clinic. he said, remains with him long after he lays eyes upon them.

“Emaciated, tired,” he said, “many of them displaced two or three times.”

Starvation and Sickness

Around 25.6 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — faced crisis-level hunger conditions in 2024, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative steered by the U.N. and major relief agencies that is considered the global authority on hunger.

Fourteen months after the conflict began, the I.P.C. reported that Sudan was experiencing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded in the country.

Last August, famine was officially declared at the camp for displaced people in the Darfur region known as Zamzam. Doctors Without Borders estimated in February 2024 that 13 children were dying per day at that camp alone. Zamzam is estimated to house hundreds of thousands of people.

There are not enough health care resources in Sudan to care for the millions of people who need treatment for rampant malnutrition, much less those struck by one or more of the four disease outbreaks — malaria, measles, dengue fever and cholera — that confront the country.

The World Health Organization reported last November that Sudan’s health care infrastructure, which was already strained before the war, was on the brink of collapse, with two-thirds of the main hospitals in conflict-riddled areas now closed. The organization has documented at least 119 attacks on health care workers and facilities since the war began, resulting in at least 189 deaths and 140 injuries.

Mr. Ahmed said that children were suffering through vicious cycles of preventable disease that predispose them to malnutrition, lamenting the plight of those he said “are supposed to be healthy, playing.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages being held by Hamas are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times during a wide-ranging news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” he told reporters. “And it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say any more, but that’s what it is.”

Mr. Trump did not elaborate about what actions he might take if the hostages were not released by the time he enters office. And he declined to provide details about what he or his advisers are doing in the days leading up to the inauguration. Officials say about 100 hostages, including some Americans, who were seized on Oct. 7, 2023, remain captive in Gaza, though they believe many of them may have died in captivity.

“They should have never taken them,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “There should have never been the attack of Oct. 7. People forget that. But there was, and many people were killed.”

President Biden and his top national security aides have been working for months to try to negotiate the release of the remaining hostages. A deal has seemed imminent several times, only to fall apart after what Biden administration officials have said were rejections by Hamas negotiators. Israeli officials have also objected to some parts of proposed deals.

During his remarks, Mr. Trump suggested that his threats against Hamas would cause the group to relent. But experts on the Middle East struggled to understand the meaning of Mr. Trump’s threats.

“I don’t have a clue, nor does he,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the George W. Bush administration.

Over the past 15 months, Israel’s military has nearly destroyed Hamas as an organized fighting force. It is unclear what more any escalated attacks by the incoming Trump administration, or Israel, could accomplish.

“I see no scenario where U.S. forces would be engaged; in any event, we don’t have a better idea than the Israelis what would force Hamas’s hand,” Mr. Kurtzer added. “Bluster is the worst form of policy.”

Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator, said it was unclear what Mr. Trump could do if the hostages were not released by his deadline. And he questioned whether Mr. Trump could persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to take a deal.

“Trump will never be able to inflict more pain on Hamas and Palestinians than Israel already has,” Mr. Miller said. “He does have leverage over Netanyahu. But would he really use it to press Israel to agree to terms of a deal that might appear to benefit Hamas?”

At one point on Tuesday, the president-elect invited Steve Witkoff, whom he intends to appoint as his Middle East envoy, to speak to reporters. Mr. Witkoff said negotiators were “making a lot of progress,” but he did not give specifics.

“And I don’t want to say too much, because I think they’re doing a really good job,” Mr. Witkoff said. “I’m really hopeful that by the inaugural we’ll have some good things to announce on behalf of the president.”

Mr. Witkoff seemed to praise the Biden administration’s efforts, saying that “I actually believe that we’re working in tandem in a really good way.” But he also singled out Mr. Trump, saying it was the president-elect’s “stature” and “the red lines he’s put out there that’s driving this negotiation.”

Mr. Witkoff added that he was “leaving tomorrow” to go back to Doha, where delegations from Israel and Hamas have been negotiating through Qatari mediators. It was unclear what role, if any, Mr. Witkoff has been playing in those talks.

The reality of a change of administrations in the United States has complicated the last-ditch efforts by Mr. Biden and his advisers to get a deal to release the hostages. Families of those still being held have urged Biden and Trump officials to work together toward that goal.

Biden national security officials have said they are keeping their Trump counterparts fully informed about the negotiations. And members of both teams appear aligned behind the same goal: using the deadline of the inauguration to pressure Hamas to release everyone it is holding.

But if a release happens, the two administrations are likely to be starkly divided over who deserves praise.

The comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff on Tuesday appeared to be devised at least in part so the president-elect can claim credit for a release if it happens just before he takes office. Mr. Witkoff told reporters that he thought Hamas was listening to Mr. Trump.

“He exhorts us to speak emphatically, and emphatically means you better get it — you better do this,” he said, adding that Hamas is not waiting for Mr. Trump to take office. “I think they heard him loud and clear. Better get done by the inaugural.”

Aides to Mr. Biden said that Mr. Witkoff and Brett McGurk, the chief negotiator for the Biden administration, had been talking regularly and that the discussions had been “constructive” and “appropriate.” Mr. McGurk has been the lead negotiator working to bring the two sides to an agreement.

That contact illustrates that “the Biden and Trump teams are far more coordinated than were, say, the Obama and Trump teams in late 2016 and early 2017,” said Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But Biden officials have argued that progress toward a deal is the result of months of painstaking discussions and Israel’s intense bombardment of Hamas.

Israel’s bombing of Gaza — which has come under intense scrutiny from many parts of the world because it has killed tens of thousands of people — severely damaged Hamas and left most of its leaders dead, including Yahya Sinwar and the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attacks. Israel’s strikes against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have further isolated Hamas, Biden officials say.

They also note that the deal under consideration now with Hamas is based on an agreement that Mr. Biden offered to Israel and Hamas in May and that was later endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Miller said it would be unusual for a member of an incoming administration, like Mr. Witkoff, to be a direct part of sensitive negotiations with foreign countries.

“It’s fascinating that he said today ‘we’re making progress,’” Mr. Miller said, referring to Mr. Witkoff. “He’s inserted himself — as has Trump — in a negotiating process owned by the Biden administration and in which they have no official role. And of course they’re setting the stage to claim credit for the deal when it happens.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s suggestion on Tuesday that the United States might reclaim the Panama Canal — including by force — unsettled Panamanians, who used to live with the presence of the U.S. military in the canal zone and were invaded by American military forces once before.

Few appeared to be taking Mr. Trump’s threats very seriously, but Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, made his country’s position clear at a news conference hours after the American president-elect mused aloud about retaking the canal.

“The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” Mr. Martínez-Acha said. “Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way.”

Experts said that Mr. Trump’s real goal might have been intimidation, perhaps aimed at securing favorable treatment from Panama’s government for American ships that use the passageway. More broadly, they said, he might be trying to send a message across a region that will be critical to his goals of controlling the flow of migrants toward the U.S. border.

“If the U.S. wanted to flout international law and act like Vladimir Putin, the U.S. could invade Panama and recover the canal,” said Benjamin Gedan, director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program in Washington. “No one would see it as a legitimate act, and it would bring not only grievous damage to its image, but instability to the canal.”

In recent weeks, as he prepares to take office, Mr. Trump has talked repeatedly about not just taking over the Panama Canal, control of which the United States ceded to Panama by treaty in the late 1990s, but also buying Greenland from Denmark (though it is not, as it happens, for sale). He returned to those expansionist themes in a rambling speech on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Florida, and this time refused to rule out using military force to retake the canal.

“It might be that you’ll have to do something,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump’s comments have not sat well with the people of Panama.

Raúl Arias de Para, an ecotourism entrepreneur and a descendant of one of the country’s founding politicians, said talk of American military force stirred memories among his compatriots of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. The military action then, he noted, was aimed at deposing the country’s authoritarian leader, Manuel Noriega.

“That was not an invasion to colonize or take territory,” Mr. Arias de Para said. “It was tragic for those who lost their loved ones, but it liberated us from a formidable dictatorship.”

Of Mr. Trump’s threat now to retake the canal, he said, “It’s a possibility that’s so remote, so absurd.” The United States has the right under the treaty to defend the canal if its operations are threatened, he said, “but that’s not the case now.”

Some experts said Mr. Trump might really be hoping to obtain assurances from Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, that he will even more aggressively work to stop the flow of migrants through the Darién Gap, the jungle stretch hundreds of thousands of migrants have crossed on their way north, fueling a surge at the U.S. border

Mr. Mulino has already pushed hard to deter migrants.

“There is no country in which the United States has found greater collaboration on migration than Panama,” said Jorge Eduardo Ritter, a former foreign affairs minister and Panama’s first canal affairs minister.

On his first day in office, Mr. Mulino approved an arrangement with the United States to curb migration through the Darién region with the help of U.S.-funded flights to repatriate migrants entering Panama illegally. Since then, the number of crossings has dropped drastically, with the lowest figures seen in nearly two years.

If Mr. Trump’s administration carries out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, it will also need countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to agree to receive flights carrying not only their own deported citizens, but also people from other nations, something Panama has not agreed to do.

Experts said it was just as likely that Mr. Trump is angling for a discount for U.S. ships, which make up the largest proportion of vessels transiting the 40-mile passage between oceans. Fees have gone up as the Panama Canal Authority has been grappling with drought and the cost of creating a reservoir to counter it.

“I imagine the president-elect would settle for a U.S. discount at the canal and declare victory,” said Mr. Gedan, of the Wilson Center.

Many experts on the region, he said, view Mr. Trump’s combative remarks as “standard operating procedure for a once-and-future president who uses threats and intimidation, even with U.S. partners and friendly countries.”

After lengthy negotiations, the United States, then under President Jimmy Carter, agreed in the late 1970s to a plan to gradually turn the canal it had built in Panama over to the country where it lay. The exchange was completed in December 1999.

Theories about why Mr. Trump appears focused on the canal were swirling this week. Some noted that ceding control of the canal over to Panama has long been a sore point for Republicans.

Others said Mr. Trump was upset that ports at the ends of the canal are controlled by companies out of Hong Kong. Panama’s president has dismissed those concerns.

“There is absolutely no Chinese interference or participation in anything to do with the Panama Canal,” Mr. Mulino said in a news conference in December.

A small country with more than four million inhabitants and no active military, as per its Constitution, Panama would be in no position to stave off the U.S. military. Protests, however, would probably be huge, and might paralyze the Panama Canal, with disastrous effects on global trade and particularly on the United States, experts agreed.

Panama, said Mr. Ritter, the former foreign minister, can only hope the United States abides by international law. “This is the case of the egg against the stone,” he said.