Good morning. The suspect in the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting wrote a note listing Trump administration officials as targets, officials said. (Here’s everything else we know about the shooting.) King Charles III and Queen Camilla are bound for Washington. They’re meant to have tea at the White House this afternoon. And in news from the farmers’ market, we’re in that narrow window of spring in New York when the only ingredient food people talk about is ramps. There’s more news below. But I’m going to start today with gold.
Gold standardsInvestors buy gold when the world seems unstable — when people worry about stocks and inflation. A gold-buying frenzy has followed nearly every financial meltdown, major terrorist attack or war in the last 25 years. Why? Gold is steady. It endures. It holds its value — indeed, its value grows. With conflicts raging in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, the price of gold now hovers around $5,000 an ounce. That is roughly four times what it was a decade ago. And the United States is at the center of that marketplace: Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American. But that’s not true. “The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined,” according to an investigation by Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios: The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath. Guardrails that were meant to prevent human rights abuses in the mining of gold across the globe have collapsed. “As prices climb ever higher,” my colleagues write, “wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.”
That instability is everywhere, they report. Gold mining funds the brutal civil war in Sudan and helped pay for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The high prices have helped both Venezuela and Iran survive financial sanctions. The biggest drug cartel in Colombia, the Clan del Golfo, mines gold and uses the proceeds to maintain its murderous control over swaths of the country. Terrorist groups are getting into the gold business, too. But for decades the Mint has looked the other way as gold from foreign sources, some unethical or illegal, has entered its plant in West Point, N.Y., to be melted down and made into coins that are legally required to be made of U.S. gold. All ‘American’
To discover the alchemy that transforms illegally mined gold into American bullion, the reporters traveled to the tropical lowlands of northwestern Colombia, in the heart of Clan del Golfo territory. They visited an illegal mining area controlled by the cartel, part of which was on a military base. And they visited the nearby town of Caucasia, where miners sell what they dig. (For the privilege of mining, selling and buying gold there, everyone involved kicks back money to the cartel.) It’s brutal, dangerous, toxic and illegal work. But once the buyers melt down what they’ve bought and have entered the purchases into ledgers — presto, the gold is legal. No one looks beyond the paperwork. Eventually, it comes to a refinery in Texas to mix with molten gold from other suppliers (from foreign mines, American jewelry resellers, Peruvian pawn shops). There, it follows the transitive property of American gold: Whatever its origin, once it enters an American cauldron, the gold industry considers the metal American. The Treasury Department has known about this problem for years. The issue came up during President Trump’s first administration. It came up again during the Biden presidency and, in 2024, that administration said it was just months away from publishing new plans for investigating gold sources. It never happened.
A Treasury spokeswoman told The Times that the Trump administration is now taking steps to track the Mint’s gold sources. But it, too, has not released a plan. Read here about what happened after Times reporters found a cartel mine on a military base.
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Electricity-hungry data centers could help everyday Americans if their needs spur investment in the aging grid, Robinson Meyer writes. Here’s a column by David French on how Ukraine has shown us the future of war and diplomacy. Human made. Human played. 75% off. Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.
Crowd control: Visitors who throng Mount Fuji’s foothills during cherry blossom season are disrupting life there. Locals are fighting back. Stretched thin: It costs so much to have kids that some Americans are rethinking their plans to start a family. Metropolitan Diary: A clown on the 5 train. Verses: It’s National Poetry Month. In the video below, Greg Cowles, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, recommends some poetry books while writing poems with fridge magnets. Click to play.
2— That is how many miles under the sea scientists sent a robot to recover a mysterious golden orb affixed to a rock. It is also the number of years that it took for researchers to identify the blob. Was it coral? A sea sponge? An alien? Find out.
London Marathon: Sabastian Sawe won the men’s race, in the first world-record-eligible race time under two hours: 1:59:30. On the women’s side, Tigst Assefa broke her own world record, finishing in 2:15:41, nine seconds faster than her win last year. M.L.B.: Boston Red Sox players denounced the team’s firing of its manager, Alex Cora. The owner, John Henry, hasn’t explained the move.
There’s a classic Japanese side dish called gomaae — blanched spinach tossed in a rich sesame dressing. Hetty Lui McKinnon developed a variation — asparagus gomaae with chilled tofu — that levels the dish up to entree status, especially if you serve it alongside a bowl of rice. The preparation’s fairly straightforward. Just make sure to have the pan ripping hot when you sear the asparagus. You want to get a nice, quick char on the outside, without overcooking the earthy grassiness within.
Jason Zinoman, our comedy critic, takes a close look at what he calls the Padilla Pause — the “S.N.L.” star Ashley Padilla’s way of extending a bit of comic business, and extending it and extending it until what could be a routine joke becomes something stranger and more absurd. “Some say that comic timing is innate,” Zinoman writes. “You either have it or you don’t. But that is too simplistic. It’s also the result of calculation and choices, a willingness to take risks.” And Padilla takes a lot of them. More on culture
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