Elections

Vice President Kamala Harris challenged former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday for refusing to do what she has done in recent days: release a report on his health, sit for a “60 Minutes” interview and commit to another presidential debate.“It makes you wonder: Why does his staff want him to hide away?” Ms. Harris asked the crowd at a rally in a packed college basketball arena in Greenville, N.C. “One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”Her line of attack marked an attempt to turn the tables on Mr. Trump, who for months had suggested that President Biden was too old to be president and accused him of hiding from the American people. And it underscored her efforts to present herself as the candidate of change and Mr. Trump as a relic of the past, as she forms a closing message in the final weeks of her campaign.“From him, we are just hearing from that same, old tired playbook,” she said. “He has no plan for how he would address the needs of the American people. He is only focused on himself.”Vice President Kamala Harris supporters at today’s rally in Greenville, N.C.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMs. Harris’s rally, which attracted about 7,000 people, was aimed especially at urging supporters in a presidential battleground state to cast their ballots before Election Day. Early voting begins on Thursday in North Carolina. “The election is here,” she said.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 drills were seen as a response to a speech by President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan, who said last week that China had “no right to represent” the island.China began holding military drills in areas surrounding Taiwan on Monday, days after Beijing accused the self-governing island’s president of promoting independence in a National Day address. China said its army, navy, air force, rocket force and other forces were taking part in the drills to test their ability to fight alongside each other, and to send a warning to Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory. It did not say when the exercises would conclude.“This is a powerful deterrent against the separatist activities of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and a legitimate and necessary action to defend national sovereignty and maintain national unity,” said Senior Col. Li Xi, a spokesman for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command, which oversees an area including Taiwan, according to state media. In a social media post, the Eastern Theater Command said it was “ready to fight at all times.”Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, in a statement, expressed “strong condemnation for such irrational and provocative behavior” and said it had dispatched troops to respond to the Chinese drills. Experts in Taiwan said the scale of the exercises was not immediately clear, given that no prior notice had been given and few details had been made public. A map posted by Chinese state media depicted the drills as being conducted in six large areas encircling Taiwan. China called the exercise “Joint Sword-2024B,” suggesting that it was a continuation of a two-day exercise in May, called “Joint Sword-2024A,” that was held after President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan was sworn in. Beijing dislikes Mr. Lai, accusing him and his party of seeking independence.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 man was arrested and accused of illegal weapons possession as he was trying to enter former President Donald J. Trump’s rally in Coachella, Calif., on Saturday evening, the Riverside County sheriff’s office said on Sunday.The man, whom they identified as Vem Miller, 49, of Las Vegas, was found to be illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Miller was later released on bail, according to the county’s inmate information system.Mr. Miller had been allowed through an outer ring of security as he drove toward the rally but was stopped by law enforcement officers at a second level of security, before Mr. Trump had arrived at the rally, Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff, said in a news conference on Sunday.In a joint statement, the U.S. attorney’s office, the Secret Service and the F.B.I. said that the Secret Service had determined “the incident did not impact protective operations and former President Trump was not in any danger.”The statement said that “while no federal arrest has been made at this time, the investigation is ongoing.”It was not clear what Mr. Miller’s motives were. Mr. Bianco said at a news conference that he believed the arrest could have thwarted a third assassination attempt on Mr. Trump.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

On This Week’s Episode:Enough power to make a small difference, but only that, so what do you do?Abbas Alawieh, a founder of the Uncommitted National Movement, with fellow Michigan delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August.Nick Oxford for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesNew York Times Audio is home to the “This American Life” archive. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

The smell of fried fish was lingering on Sunday afternoon, and there was Bill Clinton beneath a tree, wearing a Harris-Walz camouflage cap and edging closer and closer to his modest audience the longer he spoke.It was a fittingly intimate setting for Peach County, Ga., a county where elections are decided by mere hundreds of votes. And for Mr. Clinton, who rose to power as “the man from Hope,” drawing on his Arkansas roots, it was a chance to engage in a little homespun politicking before early voting begins Tuesday in Georgia, a key battleground state.“It’s going to come down to whether you are willing to do one more time what you did when you elected not only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four years ago, but Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to the two Democrats Georgia elected to the Senate. “And if you are, we will win. And if you are not, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”From a church service in Albany, where the former president reminisced about campaigning alongside the baseball great Hank Aaron, to the fish fry in Fort Valley attended by a few hundred people, Mr. Clinton used the opening hours of a two-day blitz to try to help Ms. Harris bump up her score wherever she can.The fish fry, in a predominantly rural area about two hours south of Atlanta, suggested few places were too small to seek votes — even for a former president.Former President Bill Clinton addresses the crowd at the Get Out The Vote Fish Fry in Fort Valley, Ga. on Sunday.David Walter Banks 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

Dana Edwards makes his New York Times Crossword debut, and it’s a slam dunk.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — Today’s New York Times Crossword is a debut for Dana Edwards, so I won’t presume to describe his constructing style just yet — but I am giddy at the prospect that it might be an indication of what we can expect from his future puzzles.Mr. Edwards has managed to construct a grid that, despite containing four 15-letter spanners and a brilliantly self-referential theme, sits firmly in beginner-friendly territory. As I said, I don’t know whether this is a rare occurrence or just what he does. I look forward to seeing more from him soon.Today’s ThemeAt 54A, our revealer asks us to name a [Statistical feat achieved four times in N.B.A. history]. But don’t worry, no one needs to bone up on their basketball jargon in order to solve it. We can tell that double letters are central to today’s theme just by looking at the starred entries at 17A, 24A and 41A: ACCESS HOLLYWOOD, MISS MISSISSIPPI and WELL WHOOP-DEE-DOO all contain four pairs of double letters. This compelled me to try QUADRUPLE DOUBLE as the revealer entry even though I had no idea whether it was associated with basketball. I was able to confirm my guess was correct by checking it against its crossings. Swish!I mentioned earlier that Mr. Edwards’s theme was self-referential. Not only does his grid contain exactly four themed entries with double letters — achieving a QUADRUPLE DOUBLE of another kind — but the feat he alludes to has also happened only four times in the N.B.A.’s history, which feels like an added wink.Tricky Clues20A. We refer to clues that appear between quotation marks as vocalizations because they are written as though they’re being spoken aloud. These clues tend to solve to colloquialisms; we don’t use quotation marks in entries, but while solving you can and should imagine that they are present. A casual way to say [“Go ahead, I’m an open book!”] is ASK AWAY.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

Israel’s military showed journalists parts of what it said was Hezbollah’s deeply entrenched military infrastructure across the border in southern Lebanon.We had entered southern Lebanon early Sunday afternoon in a convoy of armored vehicles through a gap punched by Israeli forces in the snaking border wall.A rustic nature trail in a forest of thorny trees and thickets led to a small clearing. Here, in the western sector of southern Lebanon, about 300 yards north of the border with Israel, Israeli forces showed us what they described as a secret military outpost of Hezbollah’s, equipped with large amounts of explosives and mines.The outpost was the second of two sites that the Israeli military showed to international journalists during a supervised visit to the area, two weeks after Israel invaded southern Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah. The sites were in a sparsely populated, leafy mountainous area near the Mediterranean coast that it now controls.At the outpost, the Israelis had displayed the mines, as well as a metal chest marked “Explosive,” with English and Russian writing and numbers, containing ammunition. Boots, helmets, a solar panel charger and other gear were also on display. According to the military officials at the scene, the small dugout had room for about 10 fighters — an explosives team, they said, whose mission was to blow a gap in the concrete border wall.The stated aim of Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon was to degrade the military capabilities of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, and to push its fighters further north. Israel has not said how far into Lebanon its forces will advance or how long they will stay.Military officials on the ground said they were surprised at the extent of Hezbollah’s entrenchment in forward positions a short walk north of the border wall — evidence, they said, that Hezbollah had made meticulous preparations to carry out its long-threatened plan to invade northern Israel.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 from our inbox:Trump and BaseballThe G.O.P. Mirage MachineGerald Ford Wasn’t a KlutzUnforeseen Crises Tomi UmTo the Editor:Re “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year,” by Kelly McMasters (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 29):I felt so connected to Ms. McMasters’s essay. Like her, I started this ritual when I was a child. Back then, my obituary was full of playful dreams, but as I grew older, it became a way to set goals that felt within reach.Writing my own obituary has helped me stay true to myself. When life gets overwhelming, I sometimes forget what’s truly important to me.Recently, while unpacking old boxes before a move, I stumbled upon a journal from my childhood. In it, I’d written about a small dream to start a charity once I got older and had my own money.I’d forgotten about it and focused only on fulfilling my own desires. But seeing it again reminded me of the pure dreams I once had and how much I’d lost sight of that part of myself.Inspired by my little note, I now try my best to be more mindful in my life. While Ms. McMasters’s mom used this as a reflection to face death, for me, it’s about staying true to the person I want to be.This essay reminds me that this practice celebrates life.Gracia ManuellaQueensTo the Editor:For my entire professional life, I both wrote and edited others’ obituaries. For that reason and more, I’ve also been the go-to for family and friends who have drafted me to write obituaries and eulogies for their loved ones … and even their own ahead of time!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