Elections

An earthshaking political moment finally arrived, and the transformation of the campaign starts now.It’s over.At 1:46 p.m., with the minute hand of the clock pointed to the number of his presidency, President Biden somberly ended his untenable re-election campaign and sought to give his downtrodden party something he could no longer provide: a sense of hope.“It is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down,” he wrote in a letter posted to X, “and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”It was an earthshaking political moment many Democrats had been clamoring for — so I’m struck by how quietly it came, and with how little fanfare. Biden’s choice, made while he is at his Delaware beach house after testing positive for Covid-19, did not leak. He told some of his senior staff only a minute before he told the world, my colleague Katie Rogers reported. He did not make a speech to the public, though he said he will later this week.His campaign’s transformation, though, starts now.About half an hour after he withdrew, Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. A little after 4 p.m., she made it official herself.“My intention,” Harris said in a statement distributed by the Biden for President campaign, “is to earn and win this nomination.”In an all-staff call, the campaign’s leaders said they were now all working for Harris for President, according to my colleague Reid Epstein.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:A Middleman’s Role in Drug PrescriptionsObjection, Your HonorTrump vs. the Environment Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?,” by Bret Stephens (column, June 26):Mr. Stephens has issued a sobering and well-documented indictment of antisemitism on elite campuses. The question asked by the headline is timely and troubling for many Jewish high school students and their families.As noted by Mr. Stephens, confused administrators and revisionist curriculums contributed to this crisis. But the insensitivity and hypocrisy of supposedly idealistic and enlightened college students may be the most striking and unkind cut of all.“Safe spaces” and rules against “microaggressions” have become commonplace on campuses. Yet when Jewish students made it known that calling for deadly attacks on Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) is offensive and intimidating, they were ignored.Chants in favor of colonization or racism would never — and should never — be met with such indifference. It hurts.Perhaps the headline of Mr. Stephens’s column should be rephrased: “Have Elite Universities Abandoned American Jews?”Alan M. SchwartzTeaneck, N.J.To the Editor:While the Ivies have claimed the antisemitism spotlight this year, Jew-hatred is flourishing on many other campuses, including mine, the University of California, Davis.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 Communist Party rebuffed calls from economists to shift away from investment-led growth and toward consumer spending.China engaged in a monthslong drumbeat of anticipation that a Communist Party leaders’ meeting would show the way to a new era of growth for the slowing economy.The outcome was a plan released on Sunday offering more than 300 steps on everything from taxes to religion. It echoed many familiar themes, like an emphasis on government investments in high-tech manufacturing and scientific innovation. There was little mention of anything that would directly address China’s plunging real estate prices or the millions of unfinished apartments left behind by failed developers.Many economists had called for a comprehensive effort to rebalance the Chinese economy away from investment and toward consumer spending. But the document — roughly 15,000 words in the English translation — made a brief and cautious call to “refine long-term mechanisms for expanding consumption.”The Communist Party’s Central Committee doubled down on industrial policy. The party promised to “promote the development of strategic industries” in eight sectors, from renewable energy to aerospace. Those were essentially the same industries as in the country’s decade-old Made in China 2025 plan to replace imports of high-tech goods with locally produced products, as part of a national push for self-reliance.A similar plan in 2013 had many provisions that have never been put into effect, such as a plan to roll out a nationwide property tax to raise money for local governments.Many of these local governments have fallen far into debt since then. Sunday’s plan proposed a different solution: The central government should become responsible for more of the country’s spending. It also called for expanding local tax revenues, but had only a bare mention of a real estate tax.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 counterattack on the Houthis, which set a vital Yemeni port ablaze, will do little to deter the militia, Yemeni and international experts said.The Israeli bombing of a vital Yemeni port controlled by the Houthi militia is not expected to deter the group from further attacks but is likely to deepen human suffering in Yemen, regional experts said.Israeli officials said the barrage of airstrikes that hit the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah on Saturday was a counterattack after the Houthis launched a drone that struck Tel Aviv on Friday, killing one Israeli and wounding several others.The Israeli strikes in Hudaydah killed three people and injured 87, many of whom were severely burned, according to a statement from the health ministry in the capital, Sana, which the Houthis control. Photos and videos from Hudaydah showed an enormous fire at the city’s port that sent black smoke billowing into the sky. The port is the main conduit by which food imports, fuel and aid enter the impoverished northern Yemen.Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military spokesman, said that Israel carried out the bombardment “in order to stop the Houthi’s terror attacks” and that it had hit “dual-use” targets including energy infrastructure.Yemeni scholars and former American officials who study the country were nearly uniform in their assessments that the Israeli strikes would do little harm to the Houthis. Instead, they said, the attack is likely to exacerbate suffering in Yemen, which is already experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises after a decade of war. The bombs hit a port that more than 20 million Yemenis depend on.“The target of the strike does more to hurt the average Yemeni than the Houthis’ ability to launch attacks on the Red Sea or Israel,” said Adam Clements, a retired U.S. Army attaché for Yemen. “Hitting a radar site, a known launch site or another military target could disrupt Houthi capabilities for a few days more than the port.”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 job of president is physically and mentally demanding. I witnessed this firsthand as a White House physician for three presidents, including as the designated physician to the president for Barack Obama during his first term. My presidential patients often worked 12-hour days seven days a week. The leader of the free world travels constantly, and participates in or leads briefings in which he must retain huge amounts of information.Health scares can happen at any moment. My role as White House physician was to keep the president healthy and performing optimally, and to provide the public with a candid medical assessment of his ability to carry out the duties of his office.I participated in tabletop exercises in the Situation Room to go over how to follow Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which deals with succession in the event the president is disabled or incapacitated. Typically, the 25th Amendment came into play when a president was going under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy or scheduled surgical procedure.It is widely assumed that the physician to the president will gather and provide pertinent medical information to those contemplating whether the amendment needs to be invoked. This is not stipulated, but most in the medical community agree that the appropriate role for a physician is to offer a medical opinion, based on facts, that is then weighed by the patient — in this case the president — and those around him.The debates around the fitness of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the last several weeks have created new pressure to start having serious conversations about exactly how the White House medical team should evaluate presidents and determine their fitness for duty — cognitively as well as physically. This has been the subject of decades of discussion within the White House medical team as well as with the broader medical community.Many Americans may want the White House medical team to take a more active role in declaring the president fit for duty. Many would probably like to see the same standard apply to candidates running for president as well. For those things to happen, these medical teams will need access to more data about these individuals than they now collect. And perhaps even more important, we should seriously consider the need for an age limit for those running for president, given the high stakes of the office and the realities of cognitive decline with aging.Many cognitive abilities decrease with ageWhile we retain much of our vocabulary as we get older, cognitive abilities such as speed and reasoning tend to decline more rapidly after age 60. More

Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.Listening to JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography — a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite — I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone’s life.All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scotch-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.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

We’re answering reader questions about this newsletter, and the news in general.We recently asked you — the readers of The Morning — to submit questions to us about this newsletter, recent news or anything else on your minds. We’re devoting today’s edition to some of your questions and our answers.We have room for only a small selection in today’s email, but we’ve posted a longer selection online, including answers from Times journalists who cover a range of subjects, whether it’s Moscow or personal fitness. We enjoyed this project so much that I expect we’ll do it again soon.About The MorningI love The Morning. Every morning when I get up, I make a cup of coffee and open the newsletter. I have one wish: Please resist using the awful phrases “modern history” or “recent history.” They are too vague to mean anything. Be precise! — Mark MatassaDavid: Thank you. And noted! We try to avoid vague language, and we will think twice before using these phrases now. I grew up surrounded by discussion of language — my mom was a copy editor, my dad a high school French teacher — and I appreciate it when readers write to us with grammar and usage critiques. Keep ’em coming.I would like to see key business/finance news included each morning. — John W. Morris IIIDavid: My colleagues and I agree that the newsletter has probably been too light on business news recently. We will aim to change that. Thank you for the nudge, John.I enjoy the mix of information you provide in The Morning. Wondering as an addition if you could add a “Good News” section. — Genie MontBlancWe 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

This month’s column is all about firsts — debut authors, new series beginnings or both. I make it a point to pick up books by new authors whenever I can. Sure, there’s pleasure to be had in discovering someone 10 books into a series and binge-reading them all, but I like embracing promising careers at the ground level, too.MAY THE WOLF DIE (Penguin Books, 359 pp., paperback, $20), the first book from Elizabeth Heider, a physicist and former U.S. Navy research analyst, bowled me over with its descriptions of Naples — seedy, beautiful, baroque — and the trials and tribulations of its main character, Nikki Serafino. Nikki, a liaison between the local police and the American military, works in a unit called Phoenix Seven where the men, when they aren’t “barraging her with sex jokes,” undermine and condescend to her at every turn. Nikki, “short and compact and muscular with a dynamic, interesting face,” can handle them just fine, thank you very much.Then, within 24 hours, she stumbles across two bodies. The first, submerged in water, is an American naval officer, and the other has connections to the military base, too. The investigation unfolds with all manner of surprises, and Nikki, to the chagrin of her Neapolitan colleagues, will be the one to solve it.Delia Pitts begins a new series with TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN (Minotaur, 312 pp., $28), which introduces Vandy Myrick. A private detective who’s recently returned to her New Jersey hometown, she’s working in the shadow of her former cop father, who now has dementia, and grieving the death of her daughter, Monica. The sleepy Queenstown that Vandy remembers as a child has changed; it’s now a nest of secrets, teeming with corruption and bigotry.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