Elections

Israel agreed to open another crossing for aid to get into Gaza, the Biden administration said late Thursday, a move seemingly aimed at tempering the U.S. president’s growing frustration over the dire humanitarian crisis in the enclave.The Israeli government did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the announcement, which came hours after President Biden had a tense phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During the call, Mr. Biden threatened to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses his concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian situation in Gaza.In a statement, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council said that Israel had agreed to open the Erez crossing to allow aid into northern Gaza, to use the port of Ashdod to direct aid into the enclave and to significantly increase deliveries from Jordan — “at the president’s request.”“These steps,” the spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson, said, “must now be fully and rapidly implemented.” More

Rebecca Goldstein says hello from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — The 46th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament will be held this weekend in Stamford, Conn. Even though the live tournament is full, solvers can participate in a virtual tournament.If you would like to attend next year, the signup at the link above usually opens in January. And remember: You, too, can look this happy and relaxed while solving puzzles in front of a gigantic timer.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesRebecca Goldstein says in her notes that she will be at the tournament, and she has left us a terrific puzzle to solve while she’s away. It was a challenge for me, but I’m glad I solved it: Her grid is packed with sparkling fill, and I learned something new from it.Tricky Clues6A. I solved BANC through the crossings because the word was not familiar to me as a “Chaise alternative.”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

In remarks at an award ceremony, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. described his colleague as a trailblazing and civic-minded presence on the Supreme Court.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. delivered a fond tribute to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Thursday, celebrating her legacy as the first woman on the Supreme Court and her commitment to advancing civics and civility after her retirement.During an award ceremony at Duke University to recognize her contribution to civics education, Chief Justice Roberts reiterated his admiration of his former colleague, a crucial swing justice who was often referred to as the most powerful woman in America. He eulogized her in December shortly after her death at 93.“Sandra Day O’Connor expanded the public image of what it meant to look like a judge,” he said. “She sounded the alarm about the growing lack of appreciation of what it means to be a citizen.”For her work in civics education, she was recognized on Thursday with the Bolch Prize for the Rule of Law, an award that has often been given to honor judges, including former Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for lifetime achievements. The award was accepted by her son Scott O’Connor.The paths of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice O’Connor have long intersected.On his first day of work at the Justice Department in 1981, the young Mr. Roberts was assigned to help prepare the future justice for her confirmation hearings in the Senate, putting together draft answers to questions he expected her to face. She was ultimately confirmed by a vote of 99 to 0.Justice O’Connor would then sit on the bench for every one of the more than three dozen cases Chief Justice Roberts argued before the Supreme Court as a lawyer, he told the audience on Thursday.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

Mary Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of her work violates the Visual Artists Rights Act, which empowers artists to save their work from destruction.The artist Mary Miss filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Des Moines Art Center to halt the planned destruction of a work of land art the museum commissioned her to create less than 40 years ago.The museum has said that the artwork, an environmental installation called “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1989-1996), has become a safety hazard and that repairing it is beyond the museum’s means. Demolition was slated to begin as early as Monday.The Art Center said Thursday that it had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.Miss’s legal action is the latest twist in an ongoing fight over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving ambitious public artworks — especially for smaller institutions operating in environments with changing weather conditions. In the weeks since the center’s plan became public, high-profile art-world figures including the collector Agnes Gund; the art critic Lucy Lippard; and the artists Laurie Anderson, Martin Puryear and Alice Aycock have written to the museum’s director, Kelly Baum, encouraging her to reconsider.Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of “Greenwood Pond” violates the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which empowers artists to protect their work from destruction if it is of “recognized stature.” The suit also contends that the museum violated its contract with the artist by failing to protect the work from the elements in the first place.Miss has asked an Iowa federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to keep the museum from draining the pond and dismantling the installation; a hearing on her request is slated for Monday morning. “The project is an original work of art and cannot be found anywhere else on planet Earth,” the lawsuit states. “Its destruction is its extinction.”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 six inmates at an upstate New York prison had said the eclipse was “a religious event that they must witness.” A statewide prison lockdown will remain in place.New York State’s corrections department agreed on Thursday to allow six men who had sued to be able to view Monday’s total solar eclipse to do so at the upstate prison where they are held, but the department stopped short of lifting a statewide prison lockdown during the eclipse.The men, inmates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County, filed a federal lawsuit last week arguing that the lockdown during the eclipse violated their constitutional right to practice their religion.Though they come from varying religious backgrounds, the men all believe that the eclipse “is a religious event that they must witness and reflect on to observe their faiths,” according to court documents.“This is a huge win for them — they are all ecstatic,” said Chris McArdle, one of the lawyers who represented the men. “Keeping our fingers crossed that it’s not cloudy or raining, they are going to be able to practice their sincerely held religious beliefs, which is the outcome we always wanted for them.”A spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said in a statement that the lawsuit had come “to an appropriate resolution.”Jeremy Zielinski, one of the men who filed the lawsuit, asked in January for permission to watch the eclipse from Woodbourne’s main yard. In his written request to prison officials, Mr. Zielinski, who is an atheist, said he believed eclipses were times to “celebrate science, reason and all things Atheism.”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

A spokesperson for the independent US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr said a passage in a fundraising email that called January 6 prisoners “activists … stripped of their constitutional liberties” was the result of an error by an outside contractor.“That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr Kennedy’s views,” the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, told NBC News, which first reported the fundraising email. “It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process.”The email, sent by Team Kennedy, asked for “help … call[ing] out the illiberal actions of our very own government”.It also said: “This is the reality that every American citizen faces – from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties.”Snowden, who leaked information about National Security Agency surveillance to outlets including the Guardian, has lived in Russia for 10 years. Assange founded WikiLeaks, which leaked US national security information, also to outlets including the Guardian. Jailed in the UK since April 2019, he is fighting extradition to the US.On 6 January 2021, Congress was attacked by a mob Donald Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his election defeat by Joe Biden, in support of Trump’s electoral fraud lie. Nine deaths are now linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,300 arrests have been made and nearly a thousand convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. As the presumptive GOP nominee for president this year, he has called January 6 prisoners “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” and featured at rallies a rendition of the national anthem by some held in a Washington jail.Trump has said that if re-elected, he will “free the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned”.An attorney by training, Kennedy, 70, is the son of a US attorney general, Robert F Kennedy, and nephew of a former president, John F Kennedy. Though his independent campaign is unlikely to win the White House, he has polled strongly. If elected, he has said, he will pardon Snowden and Assange and “look at individual cases” regarding January 6.Kennedy has also said Biden presents “a much worse threat to democracy” than Trump, because of supposed suppression of free speech regarding the coronavirus pandemic – a comment Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic and Covid conspiracy theorist, then claimed was deceptively edited.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Thursday, reporting the Team Kennedy email that called January 6 prisoners “activists”, NBC detailed how just 15 such Trump supporters are being held without having been convicted.“Most of them are credibly accused of violence against law enforcement officials,” NBC said.Examples included two prisoners who have killed people, one “charged with setting off an explosive in a tunnel full of police officers” during the Capitol attack and one “charged with conspiring to kill the FBI employees who worked on his case, a plot that allegedly unfolded after his initial pretrial release”. More

Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly strapped for cash. Small-dollar donations are running far behind their 2020 pace. Big Trump rallies aren’t yielding his biggest cash hauls. Some large-dollar donors are hesitant, in part because they worry (with good reason) that their money will be used not for the campaign but to pay his legal bills. So he has been wooing right-wing billionaires.I have no idea how successful he’ll be, but it seems highly likely that at least some billionaires will provide substantial sums to a man who tried to overturn the last election and has been open about his authoritarian intentions — using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and putting them into detention camps and more.Which raises the question: Why would billionaires support such a person?After all, it’s not as if they’ve been suffering under President Biden. Economists, myself included, often remind people that the stock market is not the economy. Low unemployment and rising real wages — both of which, by the way, the Biden economy has delivered, even if many people don’t believe it — have much more relevance to most people’s lives.But stock prices are probably a much better indicator of how the very wealthy, who hold a lot of financial assets, are doing. And although in 2020 Trump predicted a stock crash if Biden won, the market has, in fact, been hitting record highs under the current administration.Why, then, back a candidate who more or less promises to unleash social and political chaos?One straightforward answer is that the wealthy will almost certainly pay lower taxes — and corporations will be less regulated — if Trump wins than if Biden stays in office.If you believe, like some leftists, that Republicans and Democrats are basically the same — that both serve the interests of corporations and the elite — you’re wrong. The modern Democratic Party isn’t, despite what prominent Republicans say, Marxist or socialist. It does, however, have a track record of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs. Notably, the Affordable Care Act used new taxes on high-income individuals to pay for health care subsidies.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

Dr. Levin faces the challenge of guiding the university through politically fraught times.Stanford University’s next president will be Jonathan Levin, an economist who currently serves as dean of the graduate business school and whose association with the university dates back to his undergraduate days in the 1990s.Dr. Levin’s selection, announced on Thursday, was based partly on his deep understanding of the university’s culture, the school said.His appointment is also viewed as a stabilizing force, as Stanford faces turmoil stemming from protests over the Israel-Hamas war, as well as controversy over a predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president last summer amid questions about the quality of scientific research that was conducted in labs he supervised.Jerry Yang, the technology entrepreneur who is the chair of Stanford’s board of trustees, said that the selection committee chose Dr. Levin, 51, as someone who could chart a course for the university during these politically fraught times.The trustees held dozens of listening sessions, Mr. Yang said. “People wanted someone with a very distinguished academic record, somebody who has a deep familiarity with Stanford, understanding our spirit and culture,” he said on Thursday. “And they wanted someone with deep integrity.”In choosing Dr. Levin, who serves on a White House advisory panel on science and technology, Stanford’s 20-member search committee also picked someone steeped in the world of academia.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