Elections

It was the second such rain-related disaster in less than three months, as extreme weather challenges the country’s extensive network of newly built expressways.At least a dozen people were killed and many more remained missing on Saturday after part of a highway bridge collapsed Friday night amid heavy rain in western China. It was the second deadly episode in the country in less than three months involving the failure of a stretch of highway.State media reported early Saturday afternoon that 12 bodies and seven vehicles had been found, and that one person had been rescued. Eighteen vehicles and 31 people were still missing.A photograph released by the official Xinhua news agency on Saturday showed how a bridge in one direction of the highway had snapped. A section of it was folded downward, nearly perpendicular, into a churning, muddy river. A separate bridge that supported traffic in the other direction remained standing.The head of the Ministry of Emergency Management, Wang Xiangxi, went to the site Saturday morning and was overseeing a rescue effort that involved 869 people, 93 vehicles, 41 drones, 20 boats and a sonar system, according to the authorities.Both Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, and Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest leader, ordered all-out rescue efforts.They had issued similar instructions after the previous disaster, which occurred on May 1 also amid heavy rain. At least 48 people died after a section of expressway running along the side of a hill in southeastern China gave way, apparently because a landslide began underneath it. Mr. Xi had ordered that local governments across China pay more attention to identifying and dealing with such risks.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

Everyone wants Joe Biden gone.Even the people who don’t want him gone really want him gone.“Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” said one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”I have many happy memories of Rehoboth Beach. I went there growing up and have Proustian recollections of crispy French fries with vinegar sold on the Boardwalk. But now my gladdening images have been replaced by a maddening one: President Biden hunkered down in his house there, recovering from Covid, resisting talking to anyone who will tell him the truth, hoarsely yelling, “Get off my beach!” at the growing list of Democratic lawmakers and donors trying to warn him that he is pulling down his party and the country.It makes me sad that Biden doesn’t see what’s inescapable: If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy.The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.Shockingly, even as the Republicans roar out of Milwaukee, vibrating with joy, Biden’s brain trust continues to run a lousy campaign, as though nothing has changed. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, went on “Morning Joe” Friday to say that the polls aren’t as bad as they are, that Biden is “more committed than ever” to running and that, when 100,000 homes got a knock on the door this past week, 76 percent of the respondents “are with Joe Biden.” Then, as Alex Thompson reported for Axios, Dillon went from cable news to a rah-rah call telling staffers not to pay attention to cable news because “the people in our country are not watching cable news.”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 multimillionaire and prominent election denier Patrick Byrne has been boosting his funding to the Maga-allied America Project and using it to steer six-figure checks to far-right groups that push voting conspiracies in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere, according to tax records and voting experts.Byrne, the former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, said last fall that only $3m of the $30m the Florida-based project had raised at that point came from “the public”, with the rest coming from him.In 2022, the America Project almost doubled its revenues to $14.3m versus some $7.7m the prior year, according to tax records first disclosed by Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.The America Project was launched in April 2021 by Byrne and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump when he was president; both Byrne and Flynn have been vocal purveyors of falsehoods that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud. They were also both at a meeting with Trump and others in late 2020 to brainstorm ways to overturn his loss.The project’s website features bogus claims about election fraud stemming from early and mail voting, and styles itself as “an America First non-profit organization defending rights and freedoms, election victory, and border security to save America”.The project also boasts that its goal is “to be a symphony conductor of the pro-freedom, pro-constitutional movement, synchronizing and magnifying the efforts of those who wish to ally with us through connecting, training, funding, and working together to save America”.In practice, the America Project and Byrne have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Arizona-based We the People AZ Alliance, and Michigan-based United States Election Investigation and Lawsuits Inc, triggering alarms by election watchdogs and some GOP veterans due to their incendiary election denialist stances and leaders.The Arizona alliance was co-founded by Shelby Busch, a vice-chair of the Maricopa county Republican party, who in late June was caught on video threatening to kill the top county election official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa county recorder.Busch opined she would accept only “a good, Christian man that believes what we believe”.Richer, who is Jewish, said in a tweet: “This isn’t healthy. And it’s not responsible. And we shouldn’t want it as part of the Republican party” – noting Busch’s key role as a conservative activist.The Anti-Defamation League and some religious groups have condemned Busch, who is also the state chair to the Republican National Committee, for her remarks. Busch did not return calls seeking comment.Busch, who has been an adviser to Arizona Republican Senate candidate and major election denier Kari Lake, told Politico in a statement in June that “everyone knows I don’t like Richer” but said her comments were just a “joke” and “she would never condone violence”.The Arizona-based Republican consultant Tyler Montague told the Guardian “it takes a lot to make Maga world wince, but it happened when Shelby Busch said she would lynch Stephen Richer, and dog-whistled to Christian nationalists about needing someone with Christian values because Richer is Jewish”.“She was at the heart of promoting election fraud conspiracies, and is connected to Patrick Byrne, who funds the big lie and her Arizona group,” he said.Busch’s group has hauled in close to $400,000 from Byrne personally and the America project since the start of 2023, according to state campaign finance records. Of that total, Byrne has chipped in $280,000, while the America Project has given $120,000.Joe Flynn, Mike Flynn’s brother, who was president of the group for most of 2022, told the Guardian that the project tapped Busch as its Arizona “coordinator” for its 2022 poll-watching training, canvassing and “election integrity” program, dubbed Operation Eagles Wings.Unveiled in early 2022, Operation Eagles Wings was touted as an effort to “expose shenanigans at the ballot box” and to ensure “there are no repeats of the errors that happened in the 2020 election”. Byrne indicated early on that he was backing the operation with $3m.Campaign finance watchdogs raised red flags about Byrne’s and the project’s hefty funding of Busch’s operation.“This group has been bankrolled by deep-pocketed donors who are obsessed with fringe theories about election administration,” said Michael Beckel, Issue One’s research director.Citing Byrne and the MyPillow chief Mike Lindell as key funders of Busch’s group, Beckel added: “At a time when people across the political spectrum should be standing up to defend the integrity of our safe and secure elections, election deniers have used the We the People AZ Alliance to further erode trust in elections.”Neither Flynn is affiliated with the America Project any longer. Byrne did not return a phone call seeking comment.Elsewhere, Byrne and the America Project have donated more than $1.1m to a law firm and a group tied to the election conspiracist and attorney Stefanie Lambert. Lambert has notably defended Byrne in a $1.6bn lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, who charged him with defamation for his claim the company helped rig the 2020 election.The America Project’s largest single donation in 2022, $700,000, went to the Michigan-based United States Election Investigation and Lawsuits Inc, a group that Lambert co-founded, as Detroit News first reported. Another $430,000 went to Lambert’s Michigan law firm, according to 2022 tax records.Lambert was a central figure in the post-2020 election scramble by Trump allies to find non-existent fraud. Last August, she was indicted in Michigan for her alleged role in a scheme in 2021 to illegally access and tamper with voting machines.In a timing twist, Lambert was arrested in March on the Michigan charges after she appeared in court to defend Byrne against the Dominion charges.Other America Project largesse has gone to various groups and individuals who have track records for pushing voting conspiracies. In 2022 and 2021, for instance, the project paid $200,000 to 423 Catkins Maize LLC, which is tied to Jovan Pulitzer, known for his election denialist claims.Likewise in 2022 and 2021 together, the project doled out about $330,000 to Pennsylvania-based OGC Law LLC, which employs lawyer Gregory Teufel – who has tried without success to overturn a state law that permitted all residents to ask for no-excuse mail-in ballots.On a different Maga front, the America Project also gave $150,000 in 2022 to Brian Della Rocca, a Maryland-based lawyer who has done legal work for the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop at the center of the controversy about Hunter Biden’s laptop.To expand the project’s mission and muscle, Byrne in 2023 tapped Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tom Homan, to be its CEO; a hardliner on border policies Trump has said Homan will have a key post if he wins againAt the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Homan on Wednesday gave a fiery talk blasting Biden border and immigration policies, charging darkly that “this isn’t mismanagement, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design – it is a choice”.Besides his big checks to the America Project and allied groups, Byrne has tried to flex his muscles in other Maga efforts with election deniers.In a tweet last month, for instance, Byrne touted that Michael Flynn, who now leads the Maga-allied America’s Future, should be Trump’s vice-president – and painted a conspiratorial scenario.“FLYNN knows how to spring Trump from prison. The world is at war and we need a general,” Byrne tweeted.Flynn’s ties to Byrne were cemented at a rowdy White House meeting with Trump and other key election deniers on 18 December 2020, where Flynn and Byrne floated the idea of using the national guard to seize voting machines to help overturn Trump’s loss.When Byrne and Flynn, who Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador in 2016, launched the America Project, an early priority was seeking ways to block Joe Biden’s win in Arizona by promoting falsehoods about fraud.To that end, Byrne provided about $3.25m of $5.7m in funding raised by Cyber Ninjas, an obscure Florida firm with no experience in election audits that was tapped by Arizona’s Republican-led senate to review the Maricopa county election results. The firm’s final report found Biden actually got 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer than originally counted. More

Investigators have information that suggests a man intent on assassinating former President Donald J. Trump flew the device over the campaign event location on the day of the shooting.Times reporters flew a drone over the rally site three days after the shooting from a publicly accessible street. Aerial footage would have allowed the gunman to survey the site.Video by Charlie Smart and Leanne AbrahamInvestigators found a small drone in the car owned by the gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump — and believe it was used to survey the site of Mr. Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., at least once before the shooting, according to law enforcement officials.Thomas Crooks, 20, visited the area near the fairgrounds used for the rally on July 7 — six days before the event — and appears to have made another trip the morning of the shooting, according to geolocation data found on one of his two cellphones, the officials said.At some point last Saturday, Mr. Crooks seems to have flown the drone to gather footage for a layout of the Butler Farm Show grounds using a preprogrammed flight path, according to an official briefed on the situation who requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak about a continuing investigation.The discovery of the drone was delayed when investigators found two rudimentary explosive devices in his Hyundai Sonata shortly after Mr. Crooks — a highly intelligent and technologically sophisticated community college graduate — was felled by a sniper after bloodying Mr. Trump’s ear, killing a man in the crowd and seriously injuring two other people.Investigators also found several magazines for the rifle he used and a bulletproof vest in the vehicle.Over the past several days, F.B.I. technicians analyzed the drone in its lab, along with two of Mr. Crooks’s phones and other electronic devices in hopes of determining his motive.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

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former speaker, recently told her colleagues in the California delegation that if President Biden were to end his campaign she would favor the “competitive” process of an open primary rather than an anointment of Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic presidential nominee.In one of the delegation’s weekly closed-door meetings earlier this month, a small group of members were discussing the party’s stressful state of affairs, in which Mr. Biden appears defiant in the face of concerns from lawmakers and leaders in his own party who want him to step aside.Ms. Pelosi, who arrived late to the meeting, spoke up in response to questions from members. When asked about Mr. Biden, she said she did not think he could win, citing polling data, an assessment that she has shared privately with the president himself. Ms. Pelosi said that if he stayed on the ticket, Democrats would lose any shot they might have of winning back control of the House, according to three people familiar with the confidential conversation who insisted on anonymity to describe it. Lawmakers in attendance then pressed her on what the landscape would look like if Mr. Biden ultimately decided to step aside under pressure. Ms Pelosi told them she favored a competitive process. Ms. Pelosi, according to a source familiar with her thinking, is a friend and fan of Ms. Harris, a former senator from California. But she believes even Ms. Harris would be strengthened to win the general election by going through a competitive process at the convention.A second person briefed on Ms. Pelosi’s views, who also declined to be named discussing private conversations, said her desire for an open primary process is driven by polling data about who can win the election, and that she believes the Democratic Party has a deep bench of talent to draw from, including governors and senators in competitive states. Ms. Pelosi’s comments at the meeting regarding her preference for an open primary were first reported by Politico.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

new video loaded: More

The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was more cautious as both spoke ahead of next week’s visit to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Friday that an agreement to free hostages held in Gaza and establish a cease-fire was close, as administration officials prepared for what they expected to be a tense visit to Washington next week by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Blinken, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, said that the talks were “inside the 10-yard line.” Hours later at the same conference, Mr. Sullivan said there was no expectation that an agreement would be reached before Mr. Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, a speech some American officials fear could throw up new obstacles to an agreement with Hamas.Mr. Sullivan said President Biden would “focus his energy” in his meetings with Mr. Netanyahu “to get this deal done in the coming weeks.”“We are mindful that there remain obstacles in the way,” Mr. Sullivan said, “and let’s use next week to try to clear through those obstacles.”The two officials, among Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, said nothing about how Mr. Biden would juggle the crisis engulfing his re-election bid with managing the tense relationship with Mr. Netanyahu.Instead, they focused heavily on the halting, often frustrating process of getting Israel and Hamas to agree to the details of a cease-fire deal resembling the terms that Mr. Biden proposed in May. They are seeking to put pressure on Hamas to agree to a negotiated halt in the violence and to release the Israelis and other prisoners who were taken in the terrorist attack on Oct. 7.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

With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos wasn’t caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.In the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration has quietly simulated over the past year or so, Russian hackers working on behalf of Vladimir V. Putin bring down hospital systems across the United States. In others, China’s military hackers trigger chaos, shutting down water systems and electric grids to distract Americans from an invasion of Taiwan.As it turned out, none of those grim situations caused Friday’s national digital meltdown. It was, by all appearances, purely human error — a few bad keystrokes that demonstrated the fragility of a vast set of interconnected networks in which one mistake can cause a cascade of unintended consequences. Since no one really understands what is connected to what, it is no surprise that such episodes keep happening, each incident just a few degrees different from the last.Among Washington’s cyberwarriors, the first reaction on Friday morning was relief that this wasn’t a nation-state attack. For two years now, the White House, the Pentagon and the nation’s cyberdefenders have been trying to come to terms with “Volt Typhoon,” a particularly elusive form of malware that China has put into American critical infrastructure. It is hard to find, even harder to evict from vital computer networks and designed to sow far greater fear and chaos than the country saw on Friday.Yet as the “blue screen of death” popped up from the operating rooms of Massachusetts General Hospital to the airline management systems that keep planes flying, America got another reminder of the halting progress of “cyber resilience.” It was a particularly bitter discovery then that a flawed update to a trusted tool in that effort — CrowdStrike’s software to find and neutralize cyberattacks — was the cause of the problem, not the savior.Only in recent years has the United States gotten serious about the problem. Government partnerships with private industry were put together to share lessons. The F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, issue bulletins outlining vulnerabilities or blowing the whistle on hackers.President Biden even created a Cyber Safety Review Board that looks at major incidents. It is modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, which reviews airplane and train accidents, among other disasters, and publishes “lessons learned.”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