Elections

Erin Schaff/The New York Times The container ship Dali appeared to move sluggishly before striking the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday. Yet it delivered a force so large that one reasonable comparison is to a rocket launch. How could something traveling slower than a casual bike rider cause such a devastating impact? […] More

The epicenter of the presidential campaign shifted to New York on Thursday, as the incumbent president and three of his predecessors descended on the area for dueling events that illustrated the kinds of political clashes that could come to define the general election.For Democrats, it was a high-profile, celebrity-studded fund-raiser for President Biden in Manhattan. On Long Island, former President Donald J. Trump attended a wake for a New York City officer who was killed during a traffic stop on Monday. Together, the day’s events struck an unusual contrast in a general election campaign that has so far been largely defined by appearances in courtrooms and at small, invitation-only events.Mr. Biden, along with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, appeared before 5,000 donors at a Radio City Music Hall event that campaign aides said raised $25 million. The eye-popping number set a record for a single political event, according to the aides, and offered a star-studded show of Democratic unity as the president heads into a difficult re-election campaign.The three Democratic presidents spent much of their time in New York City wrapped in the glitz of their celebrity supporters. Tieless and in matching white shirts, they sat for an interview on a celebrity podcast, were roasted by the comedian Mindy Kaling and interviewed by Stephen Colbert, a late-night host.Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, made his own appearance in the area several hours earlier, at a funeral home on Long Island surrounded by hundreds of police officers and family members of the slain officer. While not officially a campaign stop, aides used the appearance to draw a sharp contrast with Mr. Biden, attacking the Democrats for spending their evening with donors and celebrities. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has spent far more time battling in court than in battleground states.Former President Donald J. Trump attending a wake for a New York City police officer on Long Island.Dave Sanders 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

After a stunning week of rain, the Todd River in Alice Springs flows once again, bringing a beleaguered community togetherThe Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email.Whenever there’s rain in the forecast for the desert town of Mparntwe, otherwise known as Alice Springs, the same question usually surfaces: “Do you think the Todd will flow?”This week, the answer was yes. The normally dry Todd River swelled with water on the back of a week’s worth of rain that dropped 184 mm (about 7.2 inches) from the skies after months of unrelenting heat, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. The rain picked up piles of debris, washed out roads and turned the usually pastel red-yellow landscape of the area in central Australia into a rich tapestry of brown-green.Local officials issued severe flood warnings, but in a region usually defined by arid heat, people were excited — even more so when the water started to rise. People swarmed the Todd’s banks, reveling in the majestic sight of a river in motion.It’s something people in this part of the world get to see only a few times a year. Although the land is never completely dry — a rich groundwater table makes itself known through the rows of mature river red gum trees that line the banks — aboveground flows of any significance are contingent on big rain.John Wischusen, a hydrogeologist based in Alice Springs, said that the usual formula for determining whether the Todd would flow was 40 millimeters of rain at a rate of 50 millimeters per hour. That’s a heavy downpour typical of a summer thunderstorm, but he added that consecutive days of wet weather at a lower intensity also would (and this week, did) tip the scales.“It’s like a roof and a water tank,” said Mr. Wischusen, explaining how the high concentration of Precambrian rocks (including gneiss and granite) in and around Alice Springs encouraged water runoff. “But the ground underneath has to be wet up to a certain level before it can flow past. That’s why you need a certain amount of rain and or intensity to get water to flow over the ground and into the river channels and through town.”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

Los Angeles finally got a close look at baseball’s megastar on Thursday as a gambling situation involving his former interpreter took a back seat to opening day.The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an eight-foot stone lantern given as a gift to the Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki, who helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a good-will tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodger fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki’s, and for years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired schoolteacher who has been coming to Dodgers game since the 1960s. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”The monument is a homage to the team’s past, and also its present.In December, the Dodgers signed the world’s biggest baseball star, the two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history, $700 million over 10 years. For good measure, the team signed another Japanese superstar, the pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years. It was the most lucrative contract ever for a pitcher.On Thursday, as Los Angeles got a glimpse of its newest megastar, Ohtani’s impact was apparent before he even stepped on the field: New advertisements for Asian companies — an airline, a retail chain, yogurt drinks, skin care products — dotted the stadium. One local newscaster — in pregame coverage that began when most Angelenos were having breakfast, or stuck in traffic — compared Ohtani to Taylor Swift, saying that the Dodgers were baseball’s version of the Eras Tour. And a new addition to the stadium menu is a Japanese fried octopus fritter being promoted as one of Ohtani’s favorite dishes.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

Jake Bunch makes his New York Times Crossword debut.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — I know people who are strictly solo solvers when it comes to working crosswords. Friends who peek at a puzzle over the solver’s shoulder and say “The answer to 40A is ___” take their lives in their hands. Solo solvers do not want help, and there is nothing wrong with that. As the second New York Times Crossword editor, Will Weng, once said, “It’s your puzzle, and you can do it any way you please.”There are also solvers like me who are grateful to have people in their lives who have decidedly different wheelhouses than they do, because asking for help acts as a kind of social icebreaker. More than once, my younger child, Devin, has saved me from crashing and burning during a tough solve. He is my go-to person when it comes to clues about mythology, computer programming and video games. My older child, Carly, is a great resource when it comes to clues about art and anime. All sports clues that I cannot answer on my own are bounced off my husband, Charles. I have had wonderful discussions about the puzzle with my family.I bring this up because there was one clue in particular in Jake Bunch’s Times crossword debut that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. It has to do with a computer game that is well known, but the clue is particularly opaque, especially since I haven’t played the game. Devin explained it to me and led me to the right answer, so not only did I make progress on that section of Mr. Bunch’s lively puzzle, but I also learned something new and had a delightful chat with my son.It doesn’t get much better than that, in my opinion.Tricky Clues1A. “Thrower of a reception” made me think of a party, but in this puzzle a ball is what’s being received. The answer is PASSER.14A. Once again I was misled, and I loved it. “Place for bucks at the bar?” sounds as if we were supposed to be thinking about tip jars, but the bucks in this clue refer to the movements of a MECHANICAL BULL.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

Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.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

I don’t know how many rent parties Minnie threw. I do know that her younger son, Cleveland Gilmore, never liked to talk to his son about his childhood and the poverty he experienced as a boy. I know this because nearly 100 years after she and her sister passed out invitations and opened their home, […] More

Israeli forces are battling to retake areas they had already seized, showing the militants’ resilience, as critics call for less destructive tactics in the war.Israeli troops and Hamas fighters waged deadly battles in and around two of the Gaza Strip’s major hospitals on Thursday as the Israeli government came under growing pressure at home and abroad to moderate its approach to a war that has devastated the enclave.Fighting raged for the 11th day at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in an area Israeli forces first seized in November. The clashes illustrated the difficulty the Israelis are having in keeping control of places they had already taken as Palestinian militants melt away and then return.In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, increasingly unpopular and facing criticism on multiple fronts, met for the first time with the families of kidnapped soldiers being held in Gaza, who accused him before the meeting of ignoring their plight for nearly six months. The soldiers’ relatives had largely remained silent in public while other families of captives spoke out, many of them saying the prime minister should agree to a truce with Hamas if that was what it would take to free their relatives.But there has been no apparent change in Israel’s determination to press on with its offensive in Gaza, despite pressure from, among others, hostage families, the Biden administration and the United Nations, where the Security Council passed a resolution on Monday demanding a cease-fire. After vetoing previous cease-fire resolutions, the United States abstained on Monday, allowing the measure to pass and signaling American displeasure over Israel’s conduct of the war.The International Court of Justice in The Hague on Thursday ordered Israel to take concrete steps to stop obstructing humanitarian aid to Gaza as starvation spreads there, calling on Israel to increase the number of land crossings for supplies and to provide “full cooperation” with the United Nations. The ruling contained the strongest language the court has used so far as it weighs a case filed by South Africa that accuses Israel of genocide, which Israel denies.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