Elections

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the progressive lightning rod whose unabated criticism of Israel has deepened the fissures in the Democratic Party over the war in Gaza, won her primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.While she prevailed, it has been a rocky summer for the “squad,” the ultraliberal faction of lawmakers in the House.Two other members of the group, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, suffered primary defeats in June and August after pro-Israel groups spent millions trying to influence those contests.Ms. Omar, 41, who is seeking a fourth term in Congress, heavily outspent her three opponents, including Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member, who came within 2,500 votes of ousting her in the 2022 primary. Unlike several other primary contests, Ms. Omar’s race did not see a large amount of campaign spending originating outside the district.Midway through Donald J. Trump’s presidency in 2018, Ms. Omar was one of several women of color on the far left of the Democratic Party who were elected to the House. That group includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.Mr. Trump famously said in 2019 that Ms. Omar and those other three women should “go back” to their countries, though she was the only one not born in the United States.Ms. Omar, who was born in Somalia and is one of two Muslim women in the House, has faced backlash for her criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian beliefs.In 2023, Republicans in the House ousted Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee in a party-line vote over her past comments about Israel that had been widely condemned as antisemitic.While showing her support for pro-Palestinian protesters at a Columbia University encampment in April, Ms. Omar created a furor when she suggested that some Jewish students were “pro-genocide.” Her daughter had been one of several students who were suspended for participating in the encampment. More

News outlets said the prime minister would step aside next month, bowing to pressure within his party, which wants to move on from his unpopular leadership. Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, intends to step down next month, bowing to pressure within his party to move on from his unpopular leadership, news outlets reported.Mr. Kishida has informed officials in his administration of his intention not to run in a governing-party election in September, according to Japanese news outlets, including the national broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News. The winner of that election will become the prime minister.Mr. Kishida, who has been prime minister since 2021, will hold a news conference Wednesday morning, according to a spokesperson for his office.This is a developing story. More

Local authorities opened an investigation into the production company for filming in a protected area without clearance, according to a news release.The production company behind Katy Perry’s music video for her single “Lifetimes” is under investigation in Spain for filming in a protected area without clearance, the authorities said Tuesday.The government of the Balearic Islands, an archipelago off eastern Spain, said in a news release that its Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Natural Environment has opened an investigation into the filming in the Parc Natural de Ses Salines. It is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage nature reserve that stretches across the islands of Ibiza and Formentera.According to several published reports, part of the video was apparently filmed within the dunes on the islet of s’Espalmador, a preserved area that Balearic Islands tourism authorities say is “highly valuable” ecologically because of the plants and animals that live there.“In no case had the production company requested authorization from the Regional Ministry to carry out the filming,” according to the news release, which is in Spanish.The government agency also said that filming was not an environmental crime and is permitted with appropriate authorization. Authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comments on Tuesday evening.“Lifetimes,” which premiered on Thursday and is a single off Perry’s upcoming studio album “143,” features the star singing and dancing on a beach and on a boat, cliff jumping and performing in a crowded nightclub. The video was directed by Stillz and produced by WeOwnTheCity, according to the end credits. Perry teased the video’s release in several posts on her Instagram account in recent days. “Sending love from Ibiza,” Perry wrote on Instagram on Thursday, the day the video premiered, using an orange heart emoji for love. The post features “Lifetimes” lyrics and a series of postcards from locations including Ibiza and Formentera, where the national park is, set against images of what appears to be seaside cliffs. The postcards appear to be outtakes from Perry’s video.WeOwnTheCity did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Katy Perry had yet to comment.According to Formentera Island Council Tourism’s website, the park includes rich, biodiverse land and marine habitats stretching from southern Ibiza to northern Formentera. The park is also a nesting area for more than 200 species of migratory birds and is home to Posidonia, a seagrass endemic to the Mediterranean Sea that plays an important role in maintaining and protecting the water and marine life. The park has been listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO since 1999, the tourism agency said.The islet of S’Espalmador is part of the park and has “one of the best-preserved and most amazing beaches,” with crystal-clear waters and a forest of pine trees and junipers, according to the Balearic Islands tourism authorities.Perry’s “143” album is set to be released in September.Jesus Jiménez More

Samuel A. Donaldson gives us a chance to beat him fair and square.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — You’ve probably heard me whine about my distaste for math before. The truth is that I don’t actually hate it: Math seems cool! I envy the heck out of Will Hunting, or really anyone who can write a long and complex equation spanning several chalkboards. I just wish that it came naturally to me.That’s why the theme for today’s crossword, constructed by Samuel A. Donaldson, gave me such a thrill: I was suddenly, albeit briefly, pretty good with numbers. The calculations in the grid are simple — we are still a word puzzle, after all — but I think you’ll feel, as I did, that the combination of mathematics and language adds up to something special. Or does it multiply?Today’s ThemeA certain [hairstylist’s observation], split between 48- and 56-Across, doubles as a key calculation to solve Mr. Donaldson’s theme: YOUR ROOTS ARE SHOWING. The themed entries, at 17-, 25- and 34-Across, refer to common phrases that include a number. But instead of the actual number, we need to write its square root into the grid.Luckily, these entries are mere tricks of language. Imagine how disappointing [Seventh heaven] would be if you felt like you were on CLOUD THREE instead of cloud nine.Tricky Clues20A. Unlike other university sports teams, whose nicknames often have something to do with their mascots or states, [Virginia Tech athletes] are called HOKIES only because a past student dreamed it up during a cheer contest at the turn of the 20th century.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

Eric Hovde, a wealthy businessman, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Wisconsin on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up a key race this fall with Senator Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic incumbent.The race was called with just 4 percent of the vote counted, with Mr. Hovde holding large leads on his challengers: Charles Barman, a construction superintendent, and Rejani Raveendran, a nurse and midwife studying at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.Ms. Baldwin’s seat is one of more than a half-dozen held by Democrats that Republicans are targeting this year. To regain control of the Senate, Republicans need to flip just one or two — depending on whether the party wins the presidency — and they are almost guaranteed to pick up one seat in West Virginia, where Senator Joe Manchin III is not running for re-election.Mr. Hovde, the multimillionaire founder of H Bancorp and the chief executive of a real estate development company, has had several false starts in his political career. He financed a failed Senate campaign in 2012 with $5.8 million from his personal fortune before ultimately losing the Republican primary. He later considered other runs for Senate and governor, but decided against them.Senator Tammy Baldwin during a campaign event in Richland Center, Wis., in June.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Hovde is one of several Republican Senate candidates this year who are in a position to self-fund their campaigns, allowing the party to devote more of its resources elsewhere. Mr. Hovde has so far pumped at least $13 million of his own money into the campaign.He has presented his wealth as a positive, saying it means he doesn’t need “special-interest money” and can be more independent, and pledging to donate his Senate salary to charity if he is elected.Ms. Baldwin, who was uncontested in the Democratic primary, has sought to cast him as out of touch with regular Americans, and as a carpetbagger because he owns property in California and has split his time between there and Wisconsin. He has been registered to vote in Wisconsin since 2012.He also drew criticism this year for suggesting that “almost nobody in a nursing home” is mentally competent to vote, saying he had gained expertise regarding nursing homes because the bank he owns lends to them.Like several of her fellow Democratic Senate candidates, Ms. Baldwin — who has the advantage of incumbency, even though Wisconsin is a competitive state — appears to be running ahead of her party’s presidential ticket. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month found her leading Mr. Hovde by eight percentage points, outstripping Vice President Kamala Harris’s four-point lead over Donald J. Trump in Wisconsin.Chris Cameron More

William Lester Suff, 70, was already on death row for a dozen murders in Southern California. Now, he has confessed to killing a 19-year-old woman, shutting a 1986 cold case, officials said.A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.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

Extreme rainfall made 10 percent heavier by human-caused climate change triggered landslides that killed hundreds, according to a new study.A sudden burst of rainfall on July 30 caused a cascade of landslides that buried hundreds of people in the mountainous Kerala region of southern India.That downpour was 10 percent heavier because of human-caused climate change, according to a study by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who quantify how climate change can influence extreme weather. Nearly six inches, or 150 millimeters, of rain fell on soils already highly saturated from two months of monsoon and marked the third highest single-day rain event on record for India.“The devastation in northern Kerala is concerning not only because of the difficult humanitarian situation faced by thousands today, but also because this disaster occurred in a continually warming world,” said Maja Vahlberg, a climate risk consultant at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “The increase in climate-change-driven rainfall found in this study is likely to increase the number of landslides that could be triggered in the future.”In a state that is highly prone to landslides, the Wayanad district is considered the riskiest part. As of Tuesday, at least 231 people had died and 100 remained missing.The Kerala landslides were the second extreme landslide event in July, following one in Ethiopia that killed 257 people. July was the second-worst month on record, after July 2019, with 95 landslide events that caused 1,167 fatalities, according to data maintained by Dave Petley, the vice-chancellor of the University of Hull. Together, they caused roughly one-third of the more than 3,600 deaths resulting from some 429 fatal landslides recorded this year, Dr. Petley said in an email.Already, 2024 is an outlier, Dr. Petley posted to The Landslide Blog on Tuesday. He wrote that he could “only speculate on the likely underlying reasons for this very high incidence of fatal landslides,” but “the most likely cause continues to be the exceptionally high global surface temperatures, and the resultant increase in high intensity rainfall events.”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 President Biden dropped his re-election bid, his administration released records showing that while he was vice president, his son solicited U.S. government assistance.Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.Embassy officials appear to have been uneasy with the request from the son of the sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company.“I want to be careful about promising too much,” wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome who was tasked with responding.“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Biden, said his client “asked various people,” including the U.S. ambassador to Italy at the time, John R. Phillips, whether they could arrange an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region of Italy, where Burisma was pursuing a geothermal project.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