Elections

Hundreds of displaced Palestinians fled one of the Gaza Strip’s last functioning hospitals on Wednesday, after the Israeli military ordered them to leave and threatened further action to stop what it said was Hamas activity there.Thousands of Gazans have sheltered at the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern city of Khan Younis for weeks, and many are terrified that Israeli forces will bombard or storm the complex, said Mohammed Abu Lehya, a doctor there. Previous Israeli warnings to evacuate hospitals, including Al-Shifa, the largest in Gaza, have often preceded military raids.Hanin Abu Tiba, 27, an English teacher sheltering at the hospital, described dire conditions inside, with food running out and aid convoys all but unable to deliver supplies. In text messages overnight, she said that she had seen an Israeli military vehicle outside the hospital gate.“I’m terrified to leave the hospital and get shot,” she said. But inside the complex, she said, “the electricity is cutting out, and the water, and the canned food is almost gone. We don’t know what to do.”Dr. Abu Lehya, in a WhatsApp message on Wednesday, called conditions at the hospital “beyond imagination.”The tensions at the hospital played out as Israel carried out extensive airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Wednesday in response to a deadly rocket attack on northern Israel. The rocket attack struck a military base near the city of Safed, killing a soldier and wounding eight people, the Israeli authorities said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but suspicion quickly fell on Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia allied with Hamas.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

Americans rehabilitate ex-presidents all the time.It was fascinating to see the rebranding of George W. Bush — the man who took us into the disastrous Iraq war and horribly bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina — into a charming amateur artist who played buddies with and passed candy to Michelle Obama.And it didn’t just happen for him. The Monica Lewinsky scandal faded in our consideration of Bill Clinton. Barack Obama’s reliance on drone strikes and his moniker “deporter in chief” rarely receive mention now.This is because our political memories aren’t fixed, but are constantly being adjusted. Politicians’ negatives are often diminished and their positives inflated. As Gallup noted in 2013, “Americans tend to be more charitable in their evaluations of past presidents than they are when the presidents are in office.”Without a doubt, Donald Trump benefits from this phenomenon. The difference is that other presidents’ shortcomings pale in comparison to his and his benefit isn’t passive: He’s seeking the office again and, as part of that, working to rewrite the history of his presidency. His desperate attempts, first to cling to power, then to regain it, include denying the 2020 election results and embracing the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that his denials helped fuel.His revisionism has worked remarkably well, particularly among Republicans. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted in December found that Republicans “are now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were ‘mostly violent,’ less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack and are slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate” than they were in 2021.This is one of the truly remarkable aspects of the current presidential cycle: the degree to which our collective memory of Trump’s litany of transgressions have become less of a political problem for him than might otherwise be expected. Even the multiple legal charges he now faces are almost all about things that happened years ago and, to many citizens, involve things that the country should put in the rearview 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

A Winthrop University poll released Wednesday shows Nikki Haley losing badly in South Carolina, her home state, with a little more than a week before the state’s Republican primary.Nearly two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters, 65 percent, said they supported former President Donald J. Trump, and only 29 percent said they supported Ms. Haley. Those numbers are very close to the average results of recent polls of South Carolina.After receiving 19 percent of the caucus vote in Iowa and 43 percent of the primary vote in New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has rested her argument for her campaign’s viability on the premise that she may not be beating Mr. Trump yet, but she is gaining ground. In an interview with NBC last month, she said of her performance in South Carolina, “I don’t think that necessarily has to be a win, but it certainly has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and it certainly has to be close.”The poll’s fine print was also bad for Ms. Haley: Only 49 percent of registered voters, including Republicans and Democrats, said they had a favorable opinion of her, down from 59 percent in the last Winthrop poll in November. The drop was sharpest among Republicans, 56 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of her, down from 71 percent in November.Mr. Trump’s approval rating among all registered voters was about the same as Ms. Haley’s, 48 percent. But he benefits from a huge 81 percent favorability rating among Republicans, and unlike Ms. Haley, he is getting more popular over time. In November, 45 percent overall and 77 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably.The poll was conducted from Feb. 2 to 10 among 1,717 adults registered to vote in South Carolina, 749 of whom said they were likely or certain to vote in the Republican primary. The margin of sampling error for the full poll is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points, and the margin of sampling error for likely primary voters is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.The timing of the poll means it predated Mr. Trump’s speech over the weekend, in which he suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members whom he considered financially delinquent and insinuated that Ms. Haley’s husband, a major in the National Guard who is deployed to Djibouti, had left the country to escape her.Ms. Haley is trying to recover from an embarrassing result last week in the Nevada primary, where Mr. Trump was not on the ballot but she nevertheless got fewer votes than a “None of These Candidates” option did. She has hammered Mr. Trump for those comments.“The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military?” she said on Monday. More

Hundreds of displaced Palestinians were fleeing a major hospital in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, according to doctors and videos from the scene, after Israeli forces ordered them to leave and threatened military action to stop what it said was Hamas activity at the hospital.Thousands of Gazans have been sheltering at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis for weeks, having been forced to flee their homes and other parts of Gaza by Israel’s intense bombardment of the territory and military orders to leave their towns and cities. Hospitals have become places of refuge during the war, even as they have often become a focus of Israel’s military offensive.Inside Nasser, which is one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, there was terror that Israeli forces would bombard or storm the complex, said Mohammed Abu Lehya, a doctor there. Previous Israeli warnings to evacuate hospitals, including Al-Shifa, the largest in Gaza, have often preceded military raids on the facilities.“The situation is very difficult, difficult, difficult, difficult,” Dr. Abu Lehya said in a WhatsApp message Wednesday morning. “It’s beyond the imagination or description.”An injured person arriving at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in December. The hospital is one of the last functioning medical facilities in the Gaza Strip.Yousef Masoud for The New York TimesA video shared on social media on Wednesday and verified by The New York Times shows crowds of people carrying belongings and bedding leaving the hospital as explosions are heard in the background. The Israeli military called for those sheltering to evacuate but said it had not called on patients and medical staff to leave the hospital.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 Ukrainian military says it has sunk a large Russian landing ship off the coast of Crimea, although Ukrainian troops inland find themselves in a precarious position.As outgunned Ukrainian soldiers struggle to hold back bloody Russian assaults on land, Ukraine said on Wednesday that its forces had struck yet another powerful blow against the Russians at sea, sinking a large Russian landing ship off the coast of Crimea before dawn.The Ukrainian military released footage of the strike, which it said had resulted in the sinking of the 360-foot-long landing ship Caesar Kunikov, its fourth-largest landing ship taken out of action in the war, possibly complicating Russia’s logistical efforts in southern Ukraine.The Ukrainian claims could not be immediately confirmed, but when NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, was asked about the attack, he called Ukraine’s campaign on the Black Sea a “great achievement.”“The Ukrainians have been able to inflict heavy losses on the Russian Black Sea Fleet,” he said at a news conference in Brussels. Russia has lost more than a third of its fleet since the war began, according to Ukrainian officials and military analysts.Russia declined to comment on the attack.At the same time, however, Ukrainian ground forces find themselves in perhaps their most precarious position since the opening months of the Russian invasion.“The enemy is now advancing along almost the entire front line, and we have moved from offensive operations to conducting a defensive operation,” Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, told the German outlet, ZDF, in his first interview since being promoted to the post last week.The epicenter of the current fighting is around the battered city of Avdiivka, a longtime Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have broken through Ukraine’s defenses to enter the city in multiple locations and are threatening to cut off the main supply line for Ukrainian defenders.Kyiv has dispatched reinforcements, but soldiers fighting there have said it is unclear how long they can hold out. A growing shortage of ammunition has forced local commanders to ration their fires, making it more difficult to push back the Russian advance. More

A Plush Dog, Samurai Sword and 42,439 Guns: Inside an N.Y.P.D. BasementIn the office of the Manhattan Property Clerk, evidence and lost items arrive by the tens of thousands. A small band of officers and civilians has to manage never-ending pressure.Feb. 14, 2024Charmain Carryl moved with purpose through the dim, cavernous room.She turned down a shadowy aisle of rolling library stacks and scanned the shelves until her eyes landed on the aim of her pursuit: a samurai sword.The sheathed blade, an identification tag tied to its golden hilt, is just one oddity kept in the basement of New York Police Department headquarters.The office of the Manhattan Property Clerk, as it is known, is a subterranean repository for lost objects and the tangible aftermath of crime and misadventure. Ms. Carryl has been a police evidence and property specialist there for more than a decade. Thousands of people walk through One Police Plaza each day not knowing an archive that allows the criminal justice system to run is just one story below their feet.Every piece of evidence stored in the basement resides in its own plastic bag, never to be opened while underground.Almost every item that passes through the borough’s 22 precincts must go to the basement to be numbered and cataloged to be held as evidence for a trial or wait for its rightful owner. Some objects come from crime scenes. Others were turned in after they were left behind on a park bench or a sidewalk.Ms. Carryl supervises the meticulous bookkeeping. She keeps track of the expected — guns, drugs, samples of DNA — and the bizarre: a gold dental grill, a half-drunk bottle of Smirnoff and a weathered brown suitcase. It is stuffed with muskets.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

If you haven’t heard of Luar, you will now.Only two days after Taylor Swift bestowed some of her fairy dust on a niche New York Fashion Week label by wearing Area jeans to the Super Bowl, an even more unlikely moment of celebrity-show synergy occurred: Beyoncé showed up in a warehouse in deep Brooklyn for the Luar show.Yup, Beyoncé’s first public appearance after announcing Renaissance “Act II,” and her first appearance at a New York Fashion Week show in years, was in Bushwick.Even in a world that has become somewhat jaded about celebrity frows (a few hours before the Luar show, Blake Lively, Brie Larson, Gabrielle Union-Wade and Rachel Zegler had shown up at Michael Kors), a Beyoncé appearance at an edgy, independent brand — the kind of brand that doesn’t have the money for pay-to-play arrangements, meaning she must actually like it — was a surprise.It’s the fashion equivalent of winning the attention lottery.The guest of honor made her entrance covered in a blinding number of rhinestones, with mirrored shades and a cowboy hat, toting a Luar bag that she carefully held front and center so it would be in every photograph. Was this a clue to her coming album couturier?Not necessarily. It turned out she and her mother, Tina Knowles, were there to support her sister, Solange, and Solange’s son, Julez Smith Jr., who was making his catwalk debut in the show.That Beyoncé’s appearance would also act like a magnet to bring eyeballs to a label that has been bubbling up through the edges of New York Fashion Week for a few seasons now was a bonus. (Raul Lopez, the Luar designer, was named the 2022 Council of Fashion Designers of America accessory designer of the year and was a finalist for the 2023 LVMH Prize for young designers.)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 report shows that X has accepted payments for subscriptions from entities barred from doing business in the United States, a potential violation of sanctions.X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, is potentially violating U.S. sanctions by accepting payments for subscription accounts from terrorist organizations and other groups barred from doing business in the country, according to a new report.The report, by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit focused on accountability for large technology companies, shows that X, formerly known as Twitter, has taken payments from accounts that include Hezbollah leaders, Houthi groups, and state-run media outlets in Iran and Russia. The subscriptions, which cost $8 a month, offer users a blue check mark — once limited to verified users like celebrities — and better promotion by X’s algorithm, among other perks.The U.S. Treasury Department maintains a list of entities that have been placed under sanctions, and while X’s official terms of service forbid people and organizations on the list to make payments on the platform, the report found 28 accounts that had the blue check mark.“We were surprised to find that X was providing premium services to a wide range of groups the U.S. has sanctioned for terrorism and other activities that harm its national security,” said Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project. “It’s yet another sign that X has lost control of its platform.”X and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Musk has said that he wants X to be a haven for free speech and that he will remove only illegal content.Since Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022, the company has made drastic changes to the way it does business — in some cases spurning advertising in favor of subscription dollars. It has also restored thousands of barred accounts and rolled back rules that once governed the site.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