Elections

For decades, Israel and Iran have fought a shadow war across the Middle East, trading attacks by land, sea, air and in cyberspace. A recent round of strikes — mainly an aerial barrage by Iran against Israel last weekend — has brought the conflict more clearly into the open and raised fears of a broader war.A retaliatory Israeli strike on an Iranian air base on Friday, however, appeared limited in scope, and analysts said it suggested an effort to pull back from the dangerous cycle and potentially move the war back into the shadows.Here is a recent history of the conflict:August 2019: An Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian-trained militants in Syria, a drone set off a blast near a Hezbollah office in Lebanon and an airstrike in Qaim, Iraq, killed a commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. Israel accused Iran at the time of trying to establish an overland arms-supply line through Iraq and northern Syria to Lebanon, and analysts said the strikes were aimed at stopping Iran and signaling to its proxies that Israel would not tolerate a fleet of smart missiles on its borders.January 2020: Israel greeted with satisfaction the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the foreign-facing arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, in an American drone strike in Baghdad.Iran hit back by attacking two bases in Iraq that housed American troops with a barrage of missiles, wounding about 100 U.S. military personnel.2021-22: In July 2021, an oil tanker managed by an Israeli-owned shipping company was attacked off the coast of Oman, killing two crew members, according to the company and three Israeli officials. Two of the officials said that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Iranian drones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

More important but less celebrated, Pierrepont then shifted his pitch to promise that the neighborhood character would be backed up by a legal guarantee. Only dwelling houses would be allowed — no rear-lot cooperages or blacksmith shops mixed in with residential uses. The homes had to be made of brick, with slate or metal roofs […] More

The NewsFor parents struggling with mental health or substance use disorders, access to treatment can often mean the difference between keeping and losing their children. But a new analysis of health and child welfare records found that a significant portion of those who were eligible for Medicaid coverage for such treatment were not getting it.The analysis, published Friday by researchers at the nonprofit institute RTI International and the Department of Health and Human Services, found that fewer than half of parents on Medicaid who had substance use disorders and had been referred to authorities over suspicions of child abuse or neglect had received treatment.A temporary shelter in Brooklyn.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Some Context: Experts say bad situations can often be reversed with treatment.Both mental health and drug addiction crises have been roiling the country, and the effects of parental drug use and mental illness can quickly trickle down to their children. Public health experts say substance use disorders can incapacitate a previously diligent parent and lead to the involvement of child protective services.In 2021 alone, more than seven million children were referred to authorities over worries of maltreatment, according to a federal report, and more than 200,000 were removed from their homes. But research shows that when parents seek treatment for psychiatric and substance use disorders, they are far less likely to experience family separation.The Numbers: What the researchers found.To calculate treatment rates among parents on Medicaid, the health insurance program for low income people, Tami Mark, a health economist at RTI, who led the research, and her colleagues drew from a new publicly available data set that used de-identified social security numbers to link child welfare records in Florida and Kentucky with corresponding Medicaid claims records from 2020.For comparison, they also analyzed a random sample of Medicaid recipients who had no records in the child welfare system. (The study didn’t capture any counseling or medication given outside the Medicaid system, nor any cases of mental health or substance use disorders that were undiagnosed.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth?! — is strangely humanizing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The “car key conversation” can be painful for families to navigate. Experts say there are ways to have it with empathy and care.Sherrie Waugh has been yelled at, insulted and wept upon in the course of her job administering driving tests. Typically these extreme reactions happen when she is forced to render an upsetting verdict: It’s time to hang up the car keys.Ms. Waugh, a certified driving rehabilitation specialist with The Brain Center, a private neuropsychology practice in Indiana, often works with older drivers, putting them through an assessment that measures things like visual skills, reaction time and processing speed.“I had one gentleman, who had early onset dementia, who was just sitting here crying,” Ms. Waugh said. “His wife was out in the car and she was crying. And we all came back, and we were all crying. Because it’s so hard.”Decisions about when an older person (or someone whose physical or mental circumstances make operating a vehicle dangerous) should stop driving are often agonizing. They can rock the driver’s sense of independence and identity, and add to the responsibilities that many family caregivers shoulder.“It’s a major, major loss for older people,” said Lauren Massimo, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing. “It’s been described to me as dehumanizing.”But it is important to raise concerns as soon as you have them, experts said, and there are ways to make the car key conversation less painful for older drivers and their loved ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Kate Hawkins opens our solving weekend.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — This is Kate Hawkins’s lucky 13th puzzle in The New York Times, and it’s a fun one. It’s enjoyable for all the usual reasons — lively fill and amusing cluing — but it also has something else.Accessibility is an important part of crossword construction and editing, and it’s a consideration no matter what day of the week a puzzle is slated to run. The Times Crossword becomes progressively more difficult as the week goes on, and solvers need ways to make headway.Puzzles that run early in the week must be evenly edited so that the entries and clues are suitable for beginner solvers. Slowly opening the tap midweek to allow more difficult entries and more challenging clues is an art form. But it’s the Friday and Saturday puzzles that tend to freak out newer solvers, and for good reason: The reputations of those grids precede them. Paul Sorvino, the actor, once used a term I can’t repeat here to describe — with admiration — how difficult the Saturday puzzle can be.So I’m happy when I solve a Friday crossword that is fairly accessible, as the one by Ms. Hawkins is, because it means that I can encourage solvers who don’t think they’re ready for one of the toughest puzzles of the week. That doesn’t mean that getting through it was easy, but, in this case, the pleasure of the solve far outweighed the struggle. And that, to me, makes Ms. Hawkins’s puzzle a perfect opportunity for those who would like to try their hands at a Friday crossword.Tricky Clues5A. The “Things attached to spines: Abbr.” are not nerves or muscles, but PGS, which is short for “pages,” because this clue refers to the spines of books.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Shaina Taub’s new Broadway musical about Alice Paul and the fight for women’s suffrage is smart and noble and a bit like a rally.Depicting extremes of human emotion, the oldest extant Western plays invited the citizens of ancient Greece to confront vital issues of contemporary justice.Only the men could act on them, though, because the women couldn’t vote.Perhaps Aeschylus and Euripides and the other big winners of fifth century B.C. Tony Awards will not be front-of-mind for you at “Suffs,” the musical about women’s suffrage that opened on Thursday at the Music Box on Broadway. But subwaying home, feeling jubilant yet dissatisfied, I couldn’t help mulling what the show says about the uses of theater 2,500 years later.Or even 100 years later. “Suffs” traces the heroic, single-minded and sometimes dangerous campaign in its final push, from 1913 through ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. I can’t imagine anyone who would not be thrilled to hear again, or for the first time, about the twisting path — the strategizing, lobbying, finagling, money-raising and course-correcting — that led to the joyful if incomplete victory.Much the same could be said of the show itself. Shaina Taub, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, started work on the project 10 years ago, creating a meaty role for herself in Alice Paul, a leader of the effort. Taub’s approach was as much about infighting as outfighting, pitting Paul against older suffragists like Carrie Chapman Catt, Black feminists like Ida B. Wells and workers’ rights firebrands like Ruza Wenclawska, each demanding a slice of the movement’s agenda.It seemed propitious that “Suffs” would start out, like that other historical fantasia “Hamilton,” at the Public Theater. But the 2022 Off Broadway premiere was a jumble of earnestness and sarcasm, its impact compromised by overreach. In her review for The New York Times, my colleague Maya Phillips wrote that it was so “scared to miss anything” that it became “bloated with information.”“Suffs” on Broadway is vastly improved. It has been beneficially recast and heavily rewritten. Half the score is new, including, crucially, the opening number. Formerly a tongue-in-cheek warning called “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” it is now a catchy welcome called “Let Mother Vote,” introducing Catt (Jenn Colella) and her nonconfrontational strategy. Men, she believes, and especially President Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), will only respond to a feminine touch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

While imposing sanctions on Iran, U.S. and European governments are urging restraint amid fears of a cycle of escalation as Israel weighs retaliation for an Iranian attack.The United States and European allies joined together on Thursday to impose new sanctions on Iranian military leaders and weapon makers, seeking to punish Iran for its missile and drone attack on Israel last weekend, while imploring Israel not to retaliate so strongly as to risk a wider war.White House officials said the sanctions targeted leaders and entities connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s Defense Ministry and the Iranian government’s missile and drone programs. The sanctions also seek to block exports by Iran’s steel industry that bring Tehran billions of dollars in revenue, they said.“I’ve directed my team, including the Department of the Treasury, to continue to impose sanctions that further degrade Iran’s military industries,” President Biden said in a statement. “Let it be clear to all those who enable or support Iran’s attacks: The United States is committed to Israel’s security.”Britain said it had imposed sanctions on seven people and six entities linked to Iran’s regional military activity and its attack on Israel, which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a “reckless act and a dangerous escalation.”“These sanctions — announced with the U.S. — show we unequivocally condemn this behavior, and they will further limit Iran’s ability to destabilize the region,” Mr. Sunak said in a statement.“Let it be clear to all those who enable or support Iran’s attacks: The United States is committed to Israel’s security,” President Biden said in a statement on Thursday.Al Drago for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More