Elections

The death of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike has dramatically weakened a key Iranian deterrent against its archenemy, Israel. Iran has long sought to have the proxies it supports in the region — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and forces in Syria, Yemen and Iraq — serve as the front line in its long-running fight with Israel. But if its most important military asset, Hezbollah, has been decimated, it may have no choice but to respond, experts said Saturday. The decisions it makes will have a significant impact on the next stage of a growing conflict that now threatens to engulf the region.“Iran’s choices really range from ugly to unpalatable,” said Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization.Julien Barnes-Dacey, the Middle East and North Africa program director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Israel’s assassination of Mr. Nasrallah significantly raises the risk of a dangerous conflagration in the Middle East, and beyond.“It really is a question of whether Hezbollah has the capacity to launch wide-ranging missile strikes on Israel at this point,” Mr. Barnes-Dacey said. If it does not, “this could now push Iran to make a dash for nuclear weapons because they see that as their only effective form of deterrence left standing.”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

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Hezbollah organization in Lebanon for more than three decades, building it into a domestic political force and a potent regional military power with ballistic missiles that could threaten Tel Aviv, was killed on Friday in heavy Israeli airstrikes near Beirut. He was 64.Both Hezbollah and Israel announced his death on Saturday. Israeli officials had said that Mr. Nasrallah was the target of the attack, which rocked the area known as the Dahiya, a dense urban area south of Beirut, with such violent force that residents fled in fear as a giant mushroom cloud rose over the city. For almost two decades, since Hezbollah fought a monthlong war against Israel in 2006, Mr. Nasrallah had largely avoided public appearances and eschewed using a telephone out of concern that he would be assassinated.In recent weeks, Israel had carried out repeated airstrikes in the same area to kill other top Hezbollah commanders, including some founding members who had been with the organization since it was established in the early 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.Mr. Nasrallah took over the group in 1992, at 32, after an Israeli rocket killed his predecessor. Over the years, his black beard turned white beneath the black turban that marked him as a revered Shiite Muslim cleric and a sayyid, a man who can trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad.Mr. Nasrallah in 2002 during an interview with The New York Times.James Hill 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

In the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed dozens of candidates down the ballot, positioning himself as Republicans’ undisputed kingmaker.But in the competitive races critical to his party’s hopes of regaining control of the Senate, his picks all fell short — leaving the chamber in the hands of Democrats.This year, even with Mr. Trump himself on the ticket, the Senate candidates he has backed to flip the seats of Democrats in key battlegrounds are running well behind him, according to recent New York Times and Siena College polling.Across five states with competitive Senate races — Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — an average of 7 percent of likely voters who plan to support Mr. Trump for president also said they planned to cast a ballot for a Democrat in their state’s Senate race.Arizona has the highest share of voters who intended to split their tickets: Ten percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would vote for Representative Ruben Gallego in the race for the state’s open Senate seat.While the dynamics are not identical, many of the races feature long-serving Democratic senators who have been able to chart a moderate course, even as Mr. Trump and his brand of politics won support in the state.Trump Runs Far Ahead of Senate Republicans in Times/Siena PollsAmong likely voters

Source: New York Times/Siena College pollsBy Christine ZhangWe 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 companies are in talks to create one of the largest pay-TV providers in the country. In 2002, the U.S. government blocked a similar deal.Business has gotten only more difficult for Charlie Ergen, the founder of the satellite TV giant Dish, since the government blocked his bid to combine his company with DirecTV in 2002.Since then, streaming services have demolished the traditional TV industry. Cable and satellite companies have lost about 30 million customers, leaving just 50 million. And the outlook for traditional providers has grown so dire that Ergen warned two years ago that Dish and DirecTV were likely to “melt away” without a deal.The challenges ahead look just as worrisome. Dish’s parent company, EchoStar, sought to fend off declines in Dish’s business by spending billions building out a 5G wireless cellphone network. It now faces the prospect of fending off slicker, faster competitors like Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which put its first satellites in space last year. So Dish and DirecTV are giving a tie-up another try. DirecTV is in the advanced stages of acquiring Dish, two people familiar with the situation told DealBook, requesting anonymity to discuss confidential negotiations. News of the merger discussions, which could still fall apart, was reported earlier by Bloomberg.The latest attempt underscores how much the entertainment industry has shifted over the last two decades. And it raises a perhaps more thorny question: Did the government fail to see how the TV market was changing when it blocked the deal the last time?The television landscape looks nothing like it did 22 years ago. Back in 2002, the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission worried that a merger between Dish and DirecTV would hurt rural subscribers. But many out-of-the-way pockets of the United States no longer rely on the satellite companies as the sole providers of TV. Broadband access has exploded as companies like Comcast and Charter have expanded further.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

Two astronauts — one American, one Russian — will launch on a flight that is set to bring the Boeing Starliner astronauts home next year.Eight times during the past four years, SpaceX has provided a regular astronaut transportation service for NASA from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Its next flight to the International Space Station, scheduled to launch on Saturday, will not be like the previous eight.There will be two, not four, astronauts aboard. Two other astronauts who were assigned to the mission will remain on Earth. And the mission, named Crew-9, will launch from a different launchpad.The shuffling is a consequence of difficulties with a different spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner, over the summer.“The word that comes to mind for this flight is ‘agility,’” Steve Stich, the manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a prelaunch news conference on Friday.Here’s what you need to know about Saturday’s launch, and why it’s unlike other recent NASA astronaut missions.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

Ms. Khan’s term as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission ended Wednesday. In a wide-ranging interview, she discussed her aggressive approach to antitrust and its critics.From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, everyone wants to know what’s next for Lina Khan.On Wednesday, the youngest-ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission reached the end of her three-year term, during which she helped to overhaul the government’s approach to antitrust enforcement and brought a slew of lawsuits against major corporations.Ms. Khan, 35, can remain in her seat indefinitely, unless she is replaced. There are factions rooting loudly for each of those outcomes.Under her leadership, the F.T.C. has brought antitrust cases against the tech giants Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, sometimes employing ambitious legal arguments. The agency has tried to ban almost all noncompete clauses and blocked Lockheed Martin and Nvidia from making multibillion-dollar deals.A powerful bipartisan cohort believes the F.T.C. chair is stretching the scope of antitrust law past its legitimate limits, rashly working to redefine the bounds of key concepts such as monopolization.Ms. Khan, her staff and her allies essentially contend the opposite: that her leadership is restoring the role of robust, active antitrust enforcement in a legal and economic system that for too long has let those regulatory muscles atrophy to the detriment of consumers and healthier market competition. Consumer watchdogs and some conservatives have cheered on Ms. Khan, defending her populist moves, like the agency’s recent warning to makers of inhalers that their aggressive use of patent loopholes may violate federal law.Some Democratic donors connected to finance and tech, however, have publicly campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris to remove Ms. Khan as chair of the F.T.C., if she wins the presidential election in November. Her campaign declined to comment on whether she would support Ms. Khan’s staying in the position.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 New York Times analysis of verified videos, photos and satellite imagery shows that at least four residential buildings on one street were destroyed Friday night when Israel struck part of southern Beirut, targeting Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.Three of the buildings were completely flattened, while another collapsed, with the upper floors partly intact.All four of the destroyed structures were residential buildings along the same street. Two neighboring apartment buildings that were at least seven stories tall were hit. About 100 yards away, two neighboring buildings that were also at least seven stories were also hit.Footage recorded on top of the debris of a flattened building also shows significant damage to several surrounding buildings. The blasts tore the facades off the lower floors and blew out many of the windows. The strikes destroyed nearby vehicles and left craters in the streets about 700 feet away.A video filmed during the strikes and posted on the social media app Telegram showed several distinct smoke plumes. An enormous cloud of smoke rose from the area of the four destroyed buildings identified by The Times, and one large plume of smoke rose from areas slightly to the east of the buildings. Multiple additional explosions can be heard and seen in the video.The extent of the damage from the strikes was not yet clear. More

As the Swannanoa River swelled and overflowed from heavy rains brought by Helene, residents of Asheville, N.C., described moments of fear and anxiety amid dangerous flooding in their region.On Friday morning, Janetta Barfield, a 58-year-old nurse at a hospital in Asheville, managed to drive across a high bridge over the river after working a night shift. But then she was met with deep water on the other side of the bridge.She tried to drive through the road that had turned into a lake after seeing another car pass. “If he could do it, I could too,” she remembered thinking at the time.Instead, “I almost drowned,” she said in an interview on Friday — her S.U.V. stalled out, and water quickly seeped into her car and rose to her chest.“I’m in trouble now,” Mrs. Barfield thought to herself in the moment.As she sat in her car, a police officer “got me and pulled me across the water,” she said.After Mrs. Barfield was rescued, she walked down to the river’s edge three times to look for her car and saw box trucks, propane tanks and islands of trash floating in the water. But her S.U.V. was nowhere in sight.Across North Carolina, about 800,000 customers were without power Friday night, with the outages concentrated in western parts of the state. The Asheville Police Department put in place an overnight curfew until 7:30 a.m. on Saturday. The police did not immediately respond to requests for updates on damages and possible injuries or deaths.Asheville, a city of about 94,600, became something of a black hole for cell service on Friday. In the afternoon, about 50 people gathered by Buncombe County Public Library’s main branch in the city’s downtown to use its Wi-Fi.Miranda Escalante, a 38-year-old bartender, was there, trying to reach her family. She knew her sister in nearby Waynesville was safe, but couldn’t get in touch with her father in the community of Swannanoa, which also suffered from powerful floods.Not knowing how her father was faring was “very scary,” Ms. Escalante said. More