Elections

One of the key points in the unsealed legal filing presented by the special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal case against Donald Trump for conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election is that both Trump and his allies were well aware that he had lost the election. The evidence, Smith says, shows that Trump knew he didn’t have a case. But rather than accept the verdict of the voting public, Trump led the effort to pressure officials to overturn election results.“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote. “The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”Smith shows that Trump did nothing to stop the mob from forming on Jan. 6 and was indifferent to the safety of both Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the Electoral College count at the Capitol, and members of Congress. Using evidence collected through interviews with people working in the White House at the time, prosecutors recreated a key moment during the chaos, when Trump was sitting alone in the White House dining room, watching Fox News.“It was at that point — alone, watching news in real time, and with knowledge that rioters had breached the Capitol building — that the defendant issued the 2:24 p.m. tweet attacking Pence for refusing the defendant’s entreaties to join the conspiracy and help overturn the results of the election,” prosecutors wrote. “One minute later, the Secret Service was forced to evacuate Pence to a secure location in the Capitol.”I don’t want to rehash the events of Jan. 6 here — although if JD Vance’s refusal to state the outcome of the 2020 presidential election is any indication, we have no choice but to rehash those events again and again between now and Nov. 5 — but I will say this: It is a misunderstanding of Donald Trump to say that he did this because he rejected his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. It is probably better to say that Trump tried to overturn the election results because he simply does not accept the idea that voters should be allowed to defeat him.We saw some of this in 2016, when he refused to say whether he would accept the election results, and we’re seeing it now, when Trump has openly said that whether he accepts the results is contingent on whether he wins. Of course, Trump’s allies in states such as Georgia and Arizona are also working incessantly to sabotage the process as much as possible and give the former president some basis for rejecting the results should he lose.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

Mr. Paterson and his stepson suffered minor injuries in a street attack on Friday. The former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault, the police said.The former governor of New York, David A. Paterson, and his stepson were injured in an assault on a Manhattan street on Friday evening, the Police Department said.Mr. Paterson, 70, and his stepson, Anthony Sliwa, 20, were walking in the Upper East Side at about 8:30 p.m. when they were attacked after a verbal altercation with five people, according to the police.Mr. Paterson suffered minor injuries to his face and body, while Mr. Sliwa received minor injuries to his face, the police said. Both were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in stable condition.A spokesman for the Police Department said the former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault.The former governor and Mr. Sliwa had been on a walk near their home when they encountered the five people, Sean Darcy, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said in a statement on Friday night. Mr. Sliwa had had “a previous interaction” with the five people, Mr. Darcy added, though details of that interaction were not immediately clear.Mr. Sliwa is the son of Curtis Sliwa, a former Republican mayoral candidate and the founder of the Guardian Angels, an anti-crime group.Mr. Paterson and his stepson were sent home from the hospital early on Saturday, Mr. Darcy said. They had been taken to the hospital as a precaution, he said, after “both suffered some injuries but were able to fight off their attackers.”They filed a police report, he said.“The governor’s only request is that people refrain from attempting to use an unfortunate act of violence for their own personal or political gain,” Mr. Darcy said on Saturday, adding that Mr. Paterson and his wife, Mary Alexander Paterson, were thankful for “the outpouring of support they have received from people across all spectrums.”The police said they were still looking for the five people suspected in the assault.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesThe five people, who were not identified, fled on foot along Second Avenue after the assault, and the police said they were still being sought. Several of them appeared to be teenagers, according to footage circulated online by the Police Department.Mr. Paterson, the 55th governor of New York and the first Black person to hold the office, served from 2008 to 2010.He rose to the position during a tumultuous time: His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned in 2008 after being linked to a high-end prostitution ring. Mr. Paterson, then the lieutenant governor, took over after Mr. Spitzer resigned.Mr. Paterson, a Democrat who served for two decades in the State Senate, weathered his own scandals and a state budget ravaged by recession. He did not seek re-election after completing his term as governor. More

The biggest risk is a sustained increase in oil prices.For nearly a year since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the start of the fighting in Gaza, investment strategists have warned that a wider war could break out in the Middle East, crimping the world’s oil supply and sending shock waves throughout the global economy.The markets have generally shrugged off the potential of a broader conflict: The price of oil has remained largely subdued, with traders reassured by the world’s plentiful supply.But after Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday, oil prices began to rise as the market appeared to factor in the risk of a growing regional conflict. After President Biden said on Thursday that there had been “discussions” about support for an Israeli attack on Iran’s oil facilities, the price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark registered its biggest weekly gain in more than a year.“Investors are finally paying attention to the Middle East after having decided it wasn’t going to move the needle,” said Tina Fordham, a former chief global political analyst at Citi who now runs an independent consultancy.“It’s not a perfect storm yet,” she said, “but it’s a constellation of risks coming together at a time when market systems still haven’t gotten comfortable that we’ve avoided a hard economic landing.”Everyone is watching Israel’s next move. Attacking Iran’s oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities, for example, would intensify the conflict. Biden has said he will not support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, and yesterday cautioned Israel against hitting Iran’s oil fields. “The risk is not zero, which means it’s high enough to consider different scenarios that range from all-out conflict that curtails energy access to a peaceful off-ramp,” said Ronald Temple, the chief market strategist for Lazard’s financial advisory and asset management business.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 derisive word for a male gentile is shegetz. I didn’t know the term until I married one. Even though my family is 100 percent Jewish and my brother took a DNA test to prove it, up to that point, I had only ever heard the female equivalent of the word: shiksa.When I heard my community of mostly secular Jews use the word shiksa growing up, it wasn’t really used as a slur; it was used as a referent for the conventional American ideal of beauty. It was understood that as Jewish women, we purportedly existed outside this ideal. We were assumed to be emasculating scolds, obligations men were saddled with rather than women to be desired.Our looks were all wrong and in need of expensive plastic surgery or hair treatments to even attempt to measure up. The feeling was summed up by a line from a throwaway character, apparently post-makeover, in a Season 2 episode of “Sex and the City” that first aired in 1999: “Well, you know, my boyfriend and I were really compatible, except for one thing. He liked thin, blond WASP-y types, so … now I am.”That’s because the shiksa stereotype looms large in American pop culture as an object of Jewish male desire. It was largely constructed in the mid-20th century by Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Writing in 2013 for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Menachem Kaiser described the stereotype succinctly:By the 1980s, what I’ll call the Allenesque Jew/shiksa split was entrenched: Jewish = nonathletic, brainy, neurotic, pasty, dark-haired, profoundly unhealthy parental relationship, usually from the New York area; shiksa = healthy, WASP-y, carefree, blond, supportive (if judgmental) parents, from the Midwest or from a home that might as well be in the Midwest.But it’s not 1980, 1999 or even 2013 anymore. It’s no longer shocking or novel when a Jew dates or marries outside his or her religion — 61 percent of Jews who have married since 2010 are intermarried, according to a 2021 Pew Research report. Among non-Orthodox Jews, that number is 72 percent.That’s why I found the experience of watching the new Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” — which was originally titled “Shiksa” — to be both off-putting and bizarre. The show seems to have been beamed in from the past century in both its depiction of Jew-gentile relations and also its gender politics.Set in Los Angeles, “Nobody Wants This” is about a blond sex-and-relationships podcaster, Joanne (Kristen Bell), who falls for a rabbi, Noah (Adam Brody). The dramatic tension comes entirely from Joanne’s shiksa status (light spoilers ahead). The majority of Noah’s circle is hostile to Joanne from the jump, particularly his mother (Tovah Feldshuh), his sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), and his ex-girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Arlook).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

Iran has a number of sensitive sites, including oil infrastructure, military installations and nuclear facilities.Iran and Israel avoided direct confrontation for years, fighting a shadow war of secret sabotage and assassinations. But the two countries are now moving closer to open conflict, after the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon this week and Tehran’s ballistic missile barrage on Israel, its second in less than six months.Israel seems prepared to strike Iran directly, in a more vigorous and public way than it has before. Iran has a number of sensitive targets, including oil production sites, military bases and nuclear sites.Here’s an overview of what an Israeli attack could look like.Iran’s oil industry More

Stephen McCauley’s novel about ex-spouses reuniting, in a sense; Jim Shepard’s noir about a fateful hit-and-run.Twenty47studio/Getty ImagesDear readers,I pulled an old favorite novel from the shelf recently, and a ghost fell out. Not an actual ectoplasm but a small cream-colored card, the lost artifact of a summer fling with a glamorous Spaniard whose chaotic charms were never meant to last past August. (Reader, I ended it at a busy crosswalk and was on the subway back to Brooklyn before the next light changed: over, as they say, in a New York minute.)Perhaps you are a better caretaker of your personal library — and your seasonal romances gone by — than I. But any fan of stoop sales and secondhand bookshops knows what it is to pick up a novel riddled with hand-drawn margin notes or ancient A.T.M. receipts, all the impenetrable detritus of some stranger’s lived-in life.Most times, that kind of mess will at least net you a modest discount. There can also be something magical, though, about these bits of literary flotsam: a whole world of small mysteries and secret histories contained in a scrawled title-page dedication or a cryptic doodle.And there’s an enduring lure, too, in revisiting a long-ago love affair, as the main characters in this week’s newsletter picks do. Whether that’s strictly advisable, mis amores, is another story.—LeahWe 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

Service has been restored in some areas after Hurricane Helene, but many people are still unable to communicate by phone, which has hampered relief efforts, worried loved ones and complicated daily life.John Tressler stood next to what was left of his storm-battered deli, part of which had collapsed in the torrents of a raging river, and waited to meet a relief crew bringing a much-needed supply of food into Swannanoa, N.C.He passed the time chatting with another business owner, and kept waiting. And waiting. He could use his phone to check the time, but, without cell service, it was of little use otherwise.The problem, Mr. Tressler soon realized, was that he had changed the meeting spot at the last minute. And that text had never gone through.More than a week after the remnants of Hurricane Helene unleashed catastrophic flooding in Swannanoa and much of western North Carolina, cell service remains spotty — or, in many cases, nonexistent.Not being able to text or call has complicated relief efforts, made previously straightforward daily tasks difficult and even kept people in the dark about whether or not their loved ones perished in the storm.The outage adds to the burden the region is now facing as the death toll from the storm has risen above 225 — more than half in North Carolina — and many population centers are facing a near future with no power or clean water. The loss of cell service has made solving those problems even harder. Officials have described not being able to reach family members of the people who died, delaying the identification of their bodies.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

Last week’s column was devoted to uncertainties about how the next president would handle the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, where America’s proxy and ally is slowly losing ground to Russia, while the United States seems trapped by its commitment to a maximal victory and unable to pivot to a strategy for peace.One could argue that the Middle East suddenly presents the opposite situation for the United States: After the last two weeks of warmaking and targeted assassinations, the position of our closest ally seems suddenly more secure, while our enemies look weaker and more vulnerable. Israel is dealing blow after blow to Hezbollah and Iran’s wider “axis of resistance,” the Iranian response suggests profound limits to their capacities, and the regional balance of power looks worse for America’s revisionist rivals than it did even a month ago.Look deeper, though, and both the strategic deterioration in Eastern Europe and the strategic improvement in the Middle East have something important in common. In both cases, the American government has found itself stuck in a supporting role, unable to decide upon a clear self-interested policy, while a regional power that’s officially dependent on us sets the agenda instead.In Ukraine this is working out badly because the government in Kyiv overestimated its own capacities to win back territory in last year’s counteroffensive. In the Middle East it’s now working out better for U.S. interests because Israeli intelligence and the Israeli military have been demonstrating a remarkable capacity to disrupt, degrade and destroy their foes.In neither case, though, does the world’s most powerful country seem to have a real handle on the situation, a plan that it’s executing or a clear means of setting and accomplishing its goals.Or as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, as Israel takes the fight to Hezbollah, “the Biden administration increasingly resembles a spectator, with limited insight into what its closest Middle East ally is planning — and lessened influence over its decisions.”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