Assassinations and Attempted Assassinations

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      Netanyahu, Ignoring Allies and Defying Critics, Basks in a Rare Triumph

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      Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, capped an increasingly brazen sequence of escalatory moves that reflected the Israeli prime minister’s renewed confidence in Israel’s military strength as well as in his own ability to navigate and defy foreign criticism, analysts said.Mr. Netanyahu’s authorization of the strike came a day after the United States, Israel’s main benefactor, called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. It occurred on the same afternoon that foreign diplomats walked out of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, protesting the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. And it came amid growing pressure on judges at the International Criminal Court to order his arrest on war crimes charges.Last October, Mr. Netanyahu canceled a similar attack against Mr. Nasrallah following American pressure to call it off and internal doubts about Israel’s ability to fight on two fronts in Gaza and Lebanon after its failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. His popularity plummeted after the Hamas raid, with polls repeatedly suggesting that he would easily lose power if a snap election was called.Nearly a year later, Mr. Netanyahu appears far less deterred by either foreign pressure or domestic frailty. Fighting in Gaza has slowed, allowing the Israeli military to focus on Hezbollah, while Mr. Netanyahu did not even consult with the United States before authorizing the strike on Friday, according to U.S. officials.“King Bibi is back,” said Nachman Shai, a former cabinet minister, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “If you compare Bibi now to Bibi 10 months ago, he’s a different person. He’s full of confidence.”Mourning Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, on Saturday in Palestine Square in Tehran.Arash Khamooshi 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

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      Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader, Dead at 64

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      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

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      Trump Is Briefed on Iranian Assassination Threats

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      U.S. intelligence agencies had previously tracked a potential Iranian assassination plot. The Trump campaign said in a statement that the threat is now heightened.Former President Donald J. Trump was briefed on Tuesday by U.S. intelligence officials about “specific threats from Iran to assassinate him,” according to his campaign.U.S. intelligence agencies had previously tracked a potential Iranian assassination plot earlier this summer, with officials stressing that they did not consider the threat related to the shooting in July that wounded Mr. Trump. Earlier this month, another man was arrested by the police after he was found lurking with a gun near Mr. Trump’s golf course in Florida. The federal government will pursue a charge of attempted assassination against that man, and there is no evidence to suggest that plot was related to Iran.Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that the threats from Iran were part of “an effort to destabilize and sow chaos” and that “intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months.”A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the briefing took place but declined to answer questions or provide any specifics. It is not clear if the intelligence officials provided new details about existing threats by Iran against Mr. Trump or if spy agencies had gathered information about new plots against him.Iranian hackers seeking to influence the 2024 election breached Mr. Trump’s campaign and then sent excerpts from documents pilfered from the campaign to people associated with President Biden’s re-election campaign this summer, though law enforcement officials said that the recipients of those materials had not responded. Iranian hackers also tried to breach the Biden-Harris campaign.Iran has also engaged in an ambitious and brazen effort to spread disinformation about the election. The effort appears intended to undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign, according to officials, but they have also targeted Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting a wider goal of sowing discord and discrediting American democracy.Russia and China have also engaged in disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing American elections. American spy agencies have assessed that Russia favors Mr. Trump, seeing him as skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine, and U.S. officials announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns this month.Julian Barnes More

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      Trump Golf Course Suspect Is Charged With Attempted Assassination

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      The new federal indictment in Florida comes on top of two gun charges against Ryan W. Routh, an itinerant contractor with an extensive criminal record.The man accused of lurking with a gun near former President Donald J. Trump at one of his Florida golf courses was charged on Tuesday with the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.The indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in Miami and filed in Federal District Court in southern Florida. The case was randomly assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who recently dismissed the case related to Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office.The new charges against the suspect, Ryan W. Routh, 58, were expected. They come on top of two gun charges against Mr. Routh, an itinerant contractor with an extensive criminal record who exhorted Iran to assassinate Mr. Trump.In addition to the assassination charges, Mr. Routh was charged with possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, along with assaulting or intimidating a Secret Service agent — possibly referring to reports of his pointing the rifle in the direction of the agents before fleeing the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.Earlier on Tuesday, a federal magistrate judge ordered Mr. Routh held until trial, citing his “lengthy criminal history with over a hundred arrests,” a history of weapons violations and his recent travel to Ukraine and Taiwan, which made him a flight risk.Just hours before that, federal prosecutors in North Carolina unsealed charges against Mr. Routh’s son, Oran A. Routh, accusing him of buying and possessing child pornography. An F.B.I. search of his apartment for evidence in his father’s case uncovered “hundreds” of sexual images on his phone involving children as young as 6, according to a court filing.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

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      After Trump Assassination Attempts, Congress Debates Secret Service Funding

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      Virtually everyone on Capitol Hill agrees that the Secret Service needs to do a better job. But Democrats and Republicans are at odds over whether to increase the agency’s budget.After the second assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump in two months, a fevered debate has broken out in Congress over whether the Secret Service needs more money.Because the dispute is unfolding on Capitol Hill and comes little more than six weeks before a presidential election, the question has, perhaps predictably, become mired in politics. And given that there are only 11 days before Congress’s deadline for extending federal spending, it is threatening to complicate already contentious negotiations aimed at heading off a government shutdown on Oct. 1.Republicans have sought to pin blame on Democrats and their anti-Trump statements for the actions of Ryan W. Routh, 58, who was arrested on Sunday after hiding in the bushes with an assault rifle at Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., in an apparent attempt to target the former president. They have accused the administration of providing better protection for President Biden than for Mr. Trump and plan to vote on Friday on a bill that would ensure that Mr. Trump is protected at the same level as the president — something the Secret Service says is already happening.Democrats, who routinely note that Mr. Trump has long trafficked in the kind of bellicose language that can fuel political violence, have said they are all for beefing up protections for him and fixing what is broken with the Secret Service.They have even offered to increase funding for the embattled agency, including potentially through a stopgap spending bill they are negotiating to avert a government shutdown. In doing so, Democrats are effectively daring Republicans — who are bent on slashing spending, not increasing it — to be the ones to object to paying for increased protection for Mr. Trump.“If the Secret Service is in need of more resources, we are prepared to provide it for them, possibly in the upcoming funding agreement,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on the floor this week.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

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      El posible segundo atentado contra Trump genera alarma en el extranjero

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      Existe la preocupación generalizada de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense haya llegado a un punto crítico.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En los nueve años transcurridos desde que Donald Trump entró en la política estadounidense, la percepción global de Estados Unidos se ha visto sacudida por la imagen de una nación fracturada e impredecible. Primero un atentado contra la vida del expresidente, y ahora un segundo posible atentado, han acentuado la preocupación internacional, suscitando temores de una agitación violenta que podría desembocar en una guerra civil.Keir Starmer, el primer ministro británico, ha dicho que está “muy preocupado” y “profundamente perturbado” por lo que, según el FBI, fue un intento de asesinar a Trump en su campo de golf de Florida, a menos de 50 días de las elecciones presidenciales y dos meses después de que una bala ensangrentó la oreja de Trump durante un mitin de campaña en Pensilvania.“La violencia no tiene cabida alguna en un proceso político”, afirmó Starmer.Sin embargo, la violencia ha tenido un lugar preponderante en esta tormentosa y tambaleante campaña política estadounidense, y no solo en los dos posibles intentos de asesinato. Ahora existe una preocupación generalizada en todo el mundo de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense, que solía ser un modelo para el mundo, haya llegado a un punto crítico.En México, donde este año se celebraron las elecciones más violentas de la historia reciente del país, con 41 candidatos y aspirantes a cargos públicos asesinados, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador dijo en una publicación en la plataforma social X: “Aun cuando todavía no se conoce bien lo sucedido, lamentamos la violencia producida en contra del expresidente Donald Trump. El camino es la democracia y la paz”.En un momento de guerras en Europa y el Medio Oriente y de inseguridad global generalizada mientras China y Rusia afirman la superioridad de sus modelos autócratas, la precariedad estadounidense pesa bastante.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

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      Secret Service Scrambled After Trump’s Short Notice on Golf Outing

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      Former President Donald J. Trump gave his Secret Service detail short notice that he would be golfing at his course in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday, causing agents to forgo a scan of the perimeter, according to two people familiar with the events.The decision not to survey the course at Trump International Golf Club, because of a lack of time, before Mr. Trump’s outing allowed a man with a gun to sit concealed in bushes for almost 12 hours. The barrel of the gun was noticed by an agent ahead of Mr. Trump on the course. The agent shot at the man, who fled. A suspect was later captured.That swift action was praised by the acting Secret Service director, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., in remarks to reporters on Monday.But the missed opportunity to find the gunman, identified by the authorities as Ryan W. Routh, as he lurked near the golf course has raised questions about the Secret Service’s ability to protect Mr. Trump, who enjoys his freedom and being around adoring fans.It also heightens pressure on the agency to add resources to protect Mr. Trump in the final months of the presidential campaign, even as the Secret Service is straining under its workload in a time of threatened violence. But some lawmakers have questioned whether more money will bring about better protection.Just two months after a different gunman fired on Mr. Trump at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., grazing the former president’s ear and killing an attendee, the agency once again must examine why it was unable to more decisively forestall an event that could have led to the death of the Republican nominee for president — and a national catastrophe.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

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      Trump Makes Big Promises, With Little Detail, for Michigan’s Auto Industry

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      Two days after an apparent assassination attempt against him, former President Donald J. Trump showed few signs on Tuesday that he would shake up his approach to campaigning.At a town hall in Flint, Mich., for his first campaign event since the Sunday incident, he made grand promises to restore auto-making jobs to the state, the heart of the American auto industry, as he gave long-winded, often meandering responses to only a few questions.To the extent that Mr. Trump was focused, it was on repeatedly vowing that his tariffs would revitalize the auto industry in Michigan, a crucial battleground state, and that a Trump loss in November would be catastrophic — referring to such an outcome as a “tragedy.”Using the dire language he often uses to frame this election, he said if “we don’t win, there will be zero car jobs, manufacturing jobs.”“It will all be out of here,” he said.Speaking to thousands of supporters in the Dort Financial Arena in Flint, he also insisted vaguely that his tariff proposals would be enough to reverse a decades-long decline in the American auto industry and bring “so many auto plants” into the state if elected.Trump supporters outside the arena in Flint where Mr. Trump spoke.Doug Mills/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