Elections

Maggie Goodlander, who has deep Washington ties, edged out Colin Van Ostern, who unsuccessfully ran for New Hampshire governor in 2016.Maggie Goodlander, a former Justice Department official and political newcomer, won the Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District on Tuesday after a close race against Colin Van Ostern, according to The Associated Press.Ms. Goodlander, who grew up in Nashua, N.H., but spent most of her adult life elsewhere, is married to Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser. She had won about 62 percent of the vote as of 8:45 p.m., edging out Mr. Van Ostern, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2016 and spent several years on the New Hampshire Executive Council.The contest became unexpectedly nasty when Mr. Van Ostern, 45, a California native, accused Ms. Goodlander, 37, of exaggerating her ties to the state and questioned her support for abortion rights. A few of his high-profile supporters defected after he ran an ad casting doubt on the sincerity of Ms. Goodlander’s commitment to reproductive rights, citing her past donations to two Republican candidates.Ms. Goodlander has spoken openly of her own struggle to find timely reproductive health care when her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition and died in her womb. She has described that experience as one that led her to seek public office.The Democratic tilt in the district, which stretches from the state’s southern border to its northernmost tip, and includes New Hampshire’s capital, Concord, gives Ms. Goodlander an advantage heading into the general election in November. The seat is being vacated by Representative Annie Kuster, a Democrat who is retiring; she endorsed Mr. Van Ostern, her one-time campaign manager.More than a dozen candidates vied for the Republican nomination; Lily Tang Wiliams came out on top, according to The Associated Press, and will face Ms. Goodlander in November.Ms. Goodlander had been depicted by detractors, including Ms. Kuster, as a well-connected Washington insider who described herself as “a renter” despite owning a $1.2 million home in Portsmouth, N.H., with her husband. Her critics had emphasized that most of her donations came from out of state, including from a number of Washington power players, and accused her of trying “to buy a seat in Congress.”Her résumé includes stints as an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve, a Senate foreign policy adviser, a Supreme Court clerk and a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.She was also born into a well-known Republican political family. Her mother, Betty Tamposi, served as a Republican in the State House of Representatives and ran for Congress in the same district that gave her daughter the nod on Tuesday.“She didn’t win, but she learned a valuable lesson that she passed down to me: Always stand up to bullies,” Ms. Goodlander said of her mother in a campaign video, adding, “The fact is, the bullies have too much power in America right now.” More

Former President Donald J. Trump repeated a false and outlandish claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have abducted and eaten their neighbors’ pets.Mr. Trump made the comments on Tuesday early in his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, shortly after Ms. Harris mocked his rallies as so filled with fictions and fringe theories that attendees leave early. Mr. Trump responded by trying to pivot back to the subject under discussion, immigration.“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” he said. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have amplified the internet rumor on the campaign trail this week. It stems from viral social media posts that have spread as Mr. Vance and others have sought to stir fears about the growing Haitian population in Springfield, though members of the community are living and working in the United States legally.Local officials have found no evidence, credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed by Haitian residents.When David Muir, a debate moderator, noted the lack of evidence, Mr. Trump said he had gotten his information from “the people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.”Ms. Harris laughed. Mr. Trump’s “extreme” statements, she said, are one of the reasons she has the endorsements of 200 Republicans.Mr. Vance first made the claim about Haitian immigrants on Monday, saying “it’s coming to your city next.” A news release from the Trump campaign later recounted the falsehoods. Mr. Vance then appeared to backtrack on Tuesday morning in a social post, saying his office had “received many inquiries” about the false claims. But he added that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”That has not stopped the social media platforms from being awash with memes and AI-generated images of cats in support of Mr. Trump.Job opportunities in Springfield, a city of roughly 58,000 people between Columbus and Dayton, have attracted thousands of Haitians since the pandemic began, with city officials estimating that as many as 20,000 have arrived. By some accounts, the immigrant community has helped revitalize the town, though it has put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals. More

Vice President Kamala Harris laced into former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday over his role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, blaming him for subsequent state-level abortion bans that, she said, have had painful consequences for many American women and their families.In the first true clash of their debate in Philadelphia, Ms. Harris noted that it was Mr. Trump’s appointees for the Supreme Court who helped eliminate the federal right to an abortion, leading to what she referred to as “Trump abortion bans.”“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree, the government and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Ms. Harris said.Mr. Trump reiterated that he supports exceptions for cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk, though some state bans allow for virtually no exceptions.Asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Mr. Trump declined to answer. When a moderator noted that his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, had said he would veto it if it came to his desk, Mr. Trump replied, “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.” At a different point, though, he said, “I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor who began her career specializing in prosecuting child sexual assault cases, described what she saw as the dangerous outcomes from some of the state bans in place now.“Understand what that means: a survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” she said, a reality in some states that she called “immoral.”In some cases, she said, a young victim of incest could be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. In other cases, she said, women who wanted their pregnancies have struggled to receive care when facing serious health complications. More

Barbara Lin reflects on common sayings.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Over the last few years, I’ve noticed the emergence of a strange tic in my speech: I swap the opening syllables of words. These swaps are called spoonerisms — and boy, do I spoonerize. I might think, for instance, about how much I enjoy solving crosswords, but then say aloud that I enjoy “crolving saucewords.” Ah yes, the saucewords! My favorite is “marinara.”I normally find these lapses in communication to be embarrassing, if not a worrisome portent of cognitive decline. But it’s likely that this tendency helped me to identify the theme of today’s crossword, which was constructed by Barbara Lin.Today’s ThemeTo allow a slang phrase or longer expression as a crossword entry, The New York Times’s puzzle editors have to deem it idiomatic enough to resonate with most solvers.Ms. Lin’s expressions are rather obscure in their forms as written; it’s only when you flip them that you discover something familiar. At 17A, for instance, to [Swim around, scare some people, ram a boat …?] solves to LIFE OF JAWS. That solution is true enough to the clue, but the more recognizable expression is its reverse: “Jaws of Life.” At 22A, a [Good quality for a midwife?] is a LOVE OF LABORS, but swap the nouns and you have the common expression “labors of love.”59A was my favorite of these reversals: [Jacket sleeves?] are ARMS OF COAT. Why yes, I thought, they certainly are.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

After launching early on Tuesday, the billionaire Jared Isaacman and his crew traveled to altitudes not visited by any astronaut since the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and ’70s.Four private astronauts aboard an ambitious space mission led by a billionaire entrepreneur traveled farther from Earth on Tuesday than any other human being in more than half a century.Two of them, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, have now gone farther from the planet than any other women ever.The mission, named Polaris Dawn, lifted off through a break of favorable weather before sunrise on Tuesday. The flight had been grounded for nearly two weeks by unsettled weather in and around Florida.The astronauts, flying an elliptical path around Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, looped outward as far out as 755 miles above the planet’s surface. The mission’s orbits were carefully planned to reduce the hit of radiation the crew would absorb, and to minimize the chances of being struck by tiny bits of rock crisscrossing the solar system.The journey on Tuesday was only a small fraction of the nearly quarter million miles that NASA’s Apollo astronauts traveled to the moon. But after the last mission going there in 1972, humanity has stayed close to our planet, not venturing beyond orbits a few hundred miles up.The Polaris Dawn mission, led by Jared Isaacman, founder of the payment services company Shift4, is a collaboration with SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk. It is the first of three missions designed to spur technological advances needed for Mr. Musk’s ambition to send people to Mars eventually.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 frothy Netflix show frustrated Parisians with its portrait of their city. Now its heroine is heading to Rome — and the showrunner doesn’t care if residents there feel the same way.“Emily in Paris,” the hit Netflix series about a young American living a life of romance and luxury in France, has ignited a blaze of indignation since it premiered in late 2020.Emily’s clumsy grasp of the native tongue, brash designer clothes and exaggerated encounters with dashing chefs and flamboyant artists left some Parisians irate and American expatriates embarrassed, even as it became one of Netflix’s most popular comedies.Now in its fourth season — split into two installments, with the second arriving Thursday — the show continues to both charm and vex with its sunny vision of what the French newspaper Liberation has called “Disneyland Paris.”But in the new batch of episodes, Emily (Lily Collins) departs Paris and heads to Rome. Invited by her new Italian love interest Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini), she zooms around on his scooter, offering a picture-postcard view of the Eternal City with stops at touristic hallmarks like the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps. As he entices Emily to move on to a new European capital, Marcello makes a pitch that doubles as the season’s mandate: “Forget about crepes. We’ll be eating pizza.”Darren Star, the creator and showrunner of “Emily in Paris,” said that Emily “was becoming very comfortable in Paris. I wanted to throw her into some unfamiliar waters.” He added that “we were able to live Emily’s life in Paris, and now we’re going to do the same thing in Rome.”Lily Collins as Emily, exploring her new surroundings.Giulia Parmigiani/NetflixWe 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

How the Spanish grocery chain Mercadona got a reputation as an unlikely dating hub, with its upside-down pineapples as props.@yosoyvivylin via InstagramAs a scorching summer draws to its close in Spain, love is in the air in an unexpected place — in air-conditioned supermarket aisles. But only for an hour a day, and with an unusual accessory: an upturned pineapple in your shopping cart to let fellow lonely hearts know you’re available.The comedian Vivy Lin is being credited in the Spanish news media for starting the fad, after she and a friend, Carla Alarcón, recorded themselves shopping for groceries in Seville a few weeks ago.In the video, Ms. Lin said she had noticed that there was a specific window of time — between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. — when the aisles in Spain’s largest superstore, Mercadona, are full of single men and women wandering aimlessly without buying much at all.Ms. Lin winked at the camera and concluded there was only one thing they could be doing: “ligando,” which roughly translates to looking for a date. With a cheeky grin, she coined a new phrase, “the dating hour in Mercadona,” and uploaded her video to TikTok.Other users took it from there. A brunette dressed to kill applied bright red lipstick and posed beside stacked shelves. Girls in sexy summer shorts and T-shirts cruised the aisles and goofed around beside the wines. A young man in a sharp suit and tousled hair smiled coyly and raised an eyebrow at fellow shoppers.“I see it as being a phenomenon of humor more than of love,” Ms. Lin, the comedian, said in a telephone interview, adding, “I think the hookup pretext has been an excuse for people to go out and have fun, to make memes and record videos.”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 speaker’s first effort to avert a government shutdown ran into a buzz saw of opposition from both far-right and mainstream Republicans.Speaker Mike Johnson’s initial plan to avert a government shutdown has run into a wall of Republican opposition, as lawmakers from an array of factions in his party balk at a six-month stopgap funding measure that Democrats have already rejected.Mr. Johnson has said he plans to bring up a spending bill this week that would extend federal funding through March 28, which includes a measure that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The addition of the voting restriction bill was a nod to the right flank of his conference and an effort to force politically vulnerable Democrats to take a fraught vote.But his $1.6 trillion proposal was almost immediately met with an outpouring of skepticism by House Republicans on Monday evening as they returned to Washington after a lengthy summer recess. Hard-line conservatives, including Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, said they would oppose the legislation because it would extend current spending levels they believe are too high.The legislation “doesn’t cut spending, and the shiny object attached to it will be dropped like a hot potato before passage,” Mr. Massie said, referring to the voting restriction. He added: “I refuse to be a thespian in this failure theater.”On the other hand, Republican defense hawks, including Representative Mike D. Rogers of Alabama, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they opposed the plan because extending current spending levels for such a lengthy period would amount to a cut to military spending, which would otherwise be slated to increase in the coming months.The internal divisions were the latest headache for Mr. Johnson in a seemingly interminable series of skirmishes over government funding that have dogged him since Republicans took control of the House. Every episode has ended with the same result: passage of a bipartisan spending bill that has angered the right flank of the House Republican conference.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