Elections

Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, once seen as a rising star, made the announcement just days after voting against impeaching the homeland security secretary.Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, announced on Saturday that he would not run for re-election, just days after breaking with his party to cast a decisive vote against impeachment charges for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary.Mr. Gallagher, who is in his fourth congressional term, is joining dozens of other lawmakers who have decided to call it quits. But the timing of his decision was striking nonetheless, coming on the heels of his impeachment vote — which had already earned him a primary challenger — and his relative youth, compared with others who are planning to retire from Congress.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Mr. Gallagher, 39, said in a statement, adding that he had made the decision not to run “with a heavy heart.”Mr. Gallagher, a Marine Corps veteran and a former congressional staffer, was an influential voice in the House when it came to matters of national security and the military. He was particularly outspoken about the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as cybersecurity, having co-chaired an intergovernmental commission on the issue early in his congressional career.Last year, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy selected him to lead a new committee tasked with investigating threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party, he was the youngest Republican wielding a panel chairman’s gavel.Mr. Gallagher also caught the eye of Senate Republican recruiters, who attempted last year to convince him to run against Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. But Mr. Gallagher decided against that bid, announcing at the time that he would seek re-election to the House.His standing in the G.O.P. appeared to have shifted earlier this week, however, after he became the third House Republican to refuse to back the impeachment effort against Mr. Mayorkas. The charges, of refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust, were widely dismissed by legal experts as not meeting the constitutional threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.The effort to impeach Mr. Mayorkas failed by just one vote.“The proponents of impeachment failed to make the argument as to how his stunning incompetence meets the impeachment threshold,” Mr. Gallagher said in a statement this week defending his decision, arguing that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would “set a dangerous new precedent that will be weaponized against future Republican administrations.”The House is expected to try to impeach Mr. Mayorkas again next week, once Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House’s No. 2 Republican who has been absent while undergoing treatment for blood cancer, returns to Washington.Mr. Gallagher did not say precisely what he planned to do next, though he indicated that his next role would also be in the national security space.“Though my title may change, my mission will always be the same,” he said in a statement. “Deter America’s enemies and defend the Constitution.” More

Former President Donald J. Trump continued his aggressive attacks on Nikki Haley Saturday, insinuating at a rally in South Carolina that her husband, a National Guardsmen, left for a deployment in order to escape her.“What happened to her husband? Where is he?” Mr. Trump said to a crowd in Conway, S.C. “He’s gone.”He then paused, before adding suggestively: “He knew. He knew.”Mr. Trump’s comments, made in Ms. Haley’s home state two weeks before its Republican primary, are a stark turn in an escalating barrage of attacks on her as he looks to knock her out of contention in the Republican primary. Though he has for weeks criticized Ms. Haley’s political views and made vague swipes claiming she lacks a presidential temperament, he has refrained from making specific personal smears.Later in his speech in South Carolina, Mr. Trump — who for months has referred to Ms. Haley as “birdbrain” without offering an explanation — called her “brain dead” while criticizing her position in national polls.Ms. Haley’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but she posted a comment on X that referred to the absence of her husband, Michael, from the campaign trail.“Michael is deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about. Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief,” she wrote.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 state law, which goes into effect Sunday, requires businesses to include any surcharges in the prices listed for the products or services they sell.A new law going into effect on Sunday will require businesses in New York to clearly post the cost of purchasing items with a credit card, including any surcharges being imposed, for customers before checkout.The law, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in December, also prevents businesses from imposing more in credit card surcharges than what they are charged by processing companies.Businesses can choose either to solely display the higher credit card price for the products or services they sell or to list both the credit card price and the lower cash price for the items.The new disclosure requirements will “ensure individuals can trust that their purchases will not result in surprise surcharges,” Ms. Hochul said in a statement this week.“Transparency is crucial in building trust between businesses and communities, and now patrons will be empowered to budget accordingly,” she said.In New Jersey, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a similar law last year requiring merchants to notify consumers before checkout about the amount of any credit card surcharges to be applied. It also prohibited merchants from charging consumers more than the processing fee the businesses paid.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

President Biden’s age has once again become a talking point in national politics. Many older Americans agree that it’s an issue; others feel it’s insulting. Bill Murphy, an 80-year-old retired veterinarian in suburban Phoenix, sometimes blanks on names he could once summon with ease, so he has empathy for 81-year-old President Biden. But he winced when he watched Mr. Biden defend his mental sharpness at a news conference, only to mix up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. Mr. Murphy, a Republican, believes Mr. Biden is not up to another term.Mary Meyer, an 83-year-old avid hiker and traveler who lives in the high desert north of Phoenix, took issue with a special counsel’s report that characterized him as elderly and forgetful — a similar assumption that strangers at the supermarket sometimes make about her capabilities. “I look at him as a peer,” said Ms. Meyer, who plans to vote for Mr. Biden. “I know what he’s capable of. I know it’s not as bad as everybody thinks.”To voters in their 70s and 80s, the renewed questions swirling around Mr. Biden’s age and fitness resonated in deeply personal ways. The special counsel report cleared him of criminal charges in his handling of classified documents but described him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”Some of Mr. Biden’s generational peers and supporters insisted the characterization was nothing more than a calculated political ploy to undercut his campaign, and play on perceived weakness. Many noted their own vibrant and busy lives, filled with mental and physical activity.The criticism of Mr. Biden as forgetful and incapable of serving echoed slights and discrimination they had felt. Others thought of their own struggles as they hit their 80s, and questioned any 80-year-old’s ability to lead the nation.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 heaviest snow is expected in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and southern New England starting on Monday into Tuesday, forecasters said.A winter storm is expected to move through the Northeast starting on Monday and lasting into Tuesday, bringing up to a foot of snow in some areas stretching from central Pennsylvania to the Catskills and Hudson Valley in New York, forecasters said.As of Saturday, the storm was over the Southern Plains in the southwestern United States, but over the next couple of days it will work its way east and then northeast.The heaviest snow is expected from northern Pennsylvania, far northwestern New Jersey and southern New York into interior southern New England, where locally a foot or more of snow could fall, said Bill Deger, a senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.In these areas, snowfall rates could exceed an inch an hour for a time, he said.The heaviest snowfalls will most likely be north of New York City, said Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center.Forecasts on Saturday called for up to a foot of snow from central Pennsylvania through the Catskills and Hudson Valley in New York and then across portions of southern New England, Connecticut and Massachusetts and through the metropolitan Boston area.The precipitation is expected to start as rain on Monday night in New York City and then turn to snow late on Tuesday morning, said David Stark, a meteorologist for the Weather Service office in New York. He said he did not expect high snow totals but added that it was too early to tell.The rain-to-snow mix can be dangerous for drivers, Mr. Deger said.“Rain falling before snow makes it very difficult for municipalities to prepare roads for the wintry weather,” he noted, “as any pretreatment can be washed away before temperatures fall below freezing and snow starts to accumulate.”Drivers should anticipate a difficult commute on Tuesday in eastern Pennsylvania through the New York City area and into the Hudson Valley and southern New England, where visibility could be reduced by locally heavy snow, Mr. Deger said.During the high tide on Tuesday in the early afternoon, “there might be pockets of minor, maybe even moderate, coastal flooding along the East Coast,” said Rob Megnia, a meteorologist for the Weather Service office in Boston. “People should be aware of that even if they’re not expecting a lot of snow.”Mr. Pereira of the Weather Prediction Center said the storm would be “fairly fast-moving.”“As we get into Tuesday evening into the overnight, the system is going to be out into the open Atlantic waters,” he said, adding that the storm should be over by Wednesday morning. More

Seven people from two families died in the inferno in Kharkiv on Friday night, as burning oil flowed like lava. “People were doomed,” an official said.The attack hit a fuel depot, causing a fire that quickly spread to several nearby homes.Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesFirefighters were digging through the burned remains of a house Saturday morning searching for the body of a child, the last member of a family killed in a catastrophic fire caused by a Russian drone attack.Four bodies already lay in bags in the yard. Investigators had found the charred remains of the father in a corridor and the mother and two children in the bathroom.Seven people in total died when Russian drones struck a fuel depot late Friday night in one of the most calamitous attacks yet on Kharkiv, the northeastern city that has suffered a series of missile strikes in recent weeks. Burning fuel poured down the street from the destroyed depot, setting a line of houses ablaze so quickly that two families were burned alive in their homes.“The family was held hostage by the fire inside their own house,” Serhii Bolvinov, chief police investigator of Kharkiv, said after firemen and investigators dug for hours through the smoldering debris. “All of them were very badly burned, and DNA examination will be needed for the final conclusions.”A home destroyed in the fire after a fuel depot was struck on Friday night. Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesOleksandr Kobylev, head of the Kharkiv regional police war-crimes department, said the Russians attacked with Iranian-supplied Shahed drones that struck shortly before 11 p.m.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

Egypt has reinforced its frontier with Gaza and warned Israel that any move that would send Gazans spilling into Egyptian territory could jeopardize their decades-old peace treaty.The pressure on Egypt is building.More than half of Gaza’s population is squeezed into miserable tent cities in Rafah, a small city along Egypt’s border, left with nowhere else to go by Israel’s military campaign. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has threatened to overrun the area, and on Friday, he directed his forces to plan the evacuation of civilians from Rafah to clear the way for a new offensive against Hamas. But it is not clear where those people could go.Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the onslaught, as it has done for people fleeing other conflicts in the region, Egypt has reinforced the frontier with Gaza and warned Israel that any move that would send Gazans spilling into its territory could jeopardize the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.Israel’s next steps in the war could force such a breaking point. More

A 6-year-old Palestinian girl and the two rescuers who went looking for her nearly two weeks ago were found dead on Saturday, the Palestine Red Crescent said, ending a desperate effort to discover their fates.Two rescuers with the Red Crescent were dispatched in an ambulance on the evening of Jan. 29 to find Hind Rajab, who was believed to be trapped in a vehicle in Gaza City with six dead family members. The aid group said they had been killed by Israeli fire.A Red Crescent statement on Saturday accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived “just meters away from the vehicle containing the trapped child Hind,” and killing the two rescuers inside. It said this happened “despite prior coordination” between the Red Crescent and the Israeli military.The Red Crescent shared an image of the charred and nearly unrecognizable ambulance on social media.Neither the Red Crescent nor Hind’s family members who were in the area around the time the ambulance arrived on Jan. 29 reported any fighting between Israeli forces and armed Palestinians there, though this could not be independently verified.The Israeli military did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the Red Crescent’s allegations. The military said last week that it was not aware of the incident.A spokeswoman for the Red Crescent said that the girl’s family had discovered the bodies of their relatives and the ambulance crew. It was not immediately clear how Hind died.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