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      Biden Says Netanyahu Is Not Doing Enough to Free Israeli Hostages

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      President Biden issued a one-word rebuke on Monday of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to reaching a cease-fire and hostage release deal, in the latest iteration of the White House’s monthslong effort to cajole and censure the Israeli leader.As he exited Marine One on the White House lawn, Mr. Biden was asked a series of questions by waiting reporters about whether Mr. Netanyahu was doing enough to achieve a deal to get the hostages back. The president responded simply: “No.”He then turned away from the reporters and headed for a meeting in the Situation Room. He told reporters he would have more to say after the meeting, which was expected to include his top national security advisers and Vice President Kamala Harris. Later, he and Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, were scheduled to appear at a campaign event together in Pennsylvania.Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu have clashed often in the past 10 months or so, but with particular intensity since the spring. White House officials thought they were near a hostage deal in mid-July, one of several moments in which they believed — and Mr. Biden publicly declared — that the negotiations mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt would result in a temporary cease-fire, with hopes of a longer-lasting one.But Mr. Biden’s hopes have been continually dashed. The latest disagreement with Mr. Netanyahu has arisen over his insistence that Israel maintain a military presence in Gaza along the Egyptian border after a cease-fire agreement comes into effect, a demand that Hamas and Egypt both oppose.Other obstacles to a deal have come from Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, who has been engaged in the negotiations remotely as he hides out, presumably underground in Gaza. More

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      Assessing JD Vance’s Appeals to the Middle Class on the Campaign Trail

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      The Republican vice-presidential nominee has assailed Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions with inaccurate claims.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who rose to fame detailing his Appalachian roots in a best-selling memoir, has made appeals to working-class and middle-class voters a core tenet of his campaign messaging.In rallies and interviews, Mr. Vance has sought to portray the Republican ticket as a champion of everyday people, first-time home buyers and autoworkers by misleadingly describing Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions on housing, trade and manufacturing.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What Was Said“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”— in a local news interview in AugustThis is exaggerated. Economists and real estate experts say that while migration, including illegal immigration, has contributed to population growth and thus demand for housing, it is not a main driver of the country’s housing affordability crisis. A lack of supply is the primary culprit, they said.Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Mr. Vance’s claim “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.”After the Great Recession, the number of new homes built annually plummeted and never really recovered in the two decades that followed. As a result, researchers and real estate firms now estimate a nationwide shortage of 1.5 million to seven million housing units.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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      Discovery of 6 Dead Hostages in Gaza Spurs Protest and Division in Israel

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      The Israeli military said Sunday that Hamas had killed the hostages before they were discovered by Israeli troops on Saturday.The Israeli military said on Sunday that six bodies found in a tunnel under the Gaza Strip belonged to hostages who had been killed by Hamas, setting off a wave of grief and anger in Israel and further cleaving the deep divisions among the public, and the country’s leaders, over the future course of the war.Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, said the bodies had been recovered a day earlier in the labyrinths under the southern city of Rafah, about one kilometer from where a seventh hostage, Farhan al-Qadi, was found alive last week.“They were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” Admiral Hagari said. The Israeli Ministry of Health said in a statement on Sunday that the hostages were killed by “a number of short-range shots” and that they had died about “48-72 hours before their examination.”After the recovery of six hostages that the Israeli military said had been killed by Hamas, demonstrators filled the streets of Tel Aviv demanding that the government do more to bring the remaining hostages home.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesIn an initial statement, Hamas did not directly address the accusations but said responsibility for the deaths lay with Israel, which it blamed for the lack of an agreement to stop the fighting in Gaza. Hamas later asserted in a separate statement that the hostages were killed by the Israeli military’s bullets, without providing evidence.The recovery of the hostages’ bodies put into stark relief the competing priorities of Israel’s leaders: those intent on dismantling Hamas through the pursuit and killing of its fighters and officials, and those who want to reach a truce that would bring home the dozens of captives still believed to be still alive in the enclave.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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      Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin Among 6 Hostages Killed in Gaza

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      Tributes were pouring in on Sunday for the six hostages who were found dead in southern Gaza over the weekend.The hostages, whose bodies were retrieved from a tunnel, ranged in age from 23 to 40. Five had been at a dance music festival in southern Israel when they were taken captive during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and its allies; a sixth was taken from the village of Be’eri.The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group of their relatives, identified the dead as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino.They were among the roughly 100 hostages remaining in Gaza, both dead and alive. Here is what we know about them.Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23Mr. Goldberg-Polin was a dual Israeli American citizen who was taken hostage from the festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7. His mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, had traveled the world since, advocating the release of the hostages.“Hersh is a happy-go-lucky, laid-back, good-humored, respectful and curious person,” she said last month when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention with her husband, Jon. “He is a civilian. He loves soccer, is wild about music and music festivals, and he has been obsessed with geography and travel since he was a little boy.”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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      Harris’s Team, With a Wink, Insists She’s an Underdog

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      Her campaign’s message that Democrats are losing, which she never voiced when President Biden was tanking the ticket, is an artful attempt to lower expectations.Days before the debate that ended up cutting off President Biden’s path to a second term, his campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, defiantly set expectations: “We are going to win,” she said in an interview with the news site Puck.Fast-forward 10 weeks. Democrats have a more popular nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, torrents of grass-roots campaign cash that Mr. Biden could have only dreamed of, a well-received convention and a running mate who has energized the party’s liberal base.Ms. O’Malley Dillon somehow seems less optimistic.“Make no mistake,” she wrote in a campaign memo released on Sunday morning. “We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.”How can it be that a campaign that by all metrics is better off than it was in late June is now pushing a narrative that things are worse than they were when Mr. Biden was in the race?It is because the Harris operation, like any campaign riding a wave of momentum, is suddenly worried about overconfidence. The New York Times’s polling average has shown her ahead since Aug. 6, the day she unveiled Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. And the mood carried over from the Democratic National Convention is hardly one of a party despairing about its chances against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden never declared his campaign an underdog. Neither did Ms. Harris until July 27. Before that, with Mr. Biden still running, she had nothing but confidence in public. Several times in the post-debate period, as Mr. Biden’s campaign began to look like a rolling catastrophe, Ms. Harris declared that they would be re-elected.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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      Criticizing Trump, Harris Says Arlington Is ‘Not a Place for Politics’

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign filmed him at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, which led to a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday for his visit on Monday to Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign’s filming of him in a heavily restricted area caused a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. In her first public comments on the situation, Ms. Harris said that Mr. Trump had desecrated a solemn place that should be free of politics when he appeared there for a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years ago. “Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Ms. Harris wrote on X. Ms. Harris wrote that she had visited Arlington National Cemetery several times as vice president and that she would never attempt to use that setting for activities related to the campaign. “It’s not a place for politics,” she wrote. Mr. Trump, in recent days, has hit back hard at critics of his visit to the cemetery, saying that families of some of the fallen service members had asked him to take photos with them there. Soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknowns during former President Donald J. Trump’s visit, on Monday in Arlington, Va.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday, but his allies rushed to his defense, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.“President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence,” Mr. Vance wrote on X, responding directly to Ms. Harris. “Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden-Harris administration, which the former president has sought to cast as weak and dysfunctional. President Biden made the final decision to end America’s nearly 20-year military occupation in Afghanistan. But it was Mr. Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for the U.S. exit.At a campaign event on Thursday in Potterville, Mich., Mr. Trump said that he was honored to take photos with the family members of some of the fallen service members at the cemetery and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had “killed their children” with their “incompetence.” More

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      America Does Not Need the Death Penalty

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      Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”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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      Gaza Debate Reopens Divisions Between Left-Wing Workers and Union Leaders

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      Last week’s Democratic National Convention surfaced differences over the war in Gaza that could widen fissures between labor activists and union officials.When members of the Chicago Teachers Union showed up to march at the Democratic National Convention last week, many expressed two distinct frustrations.The first was over the war in Gaza, which they blamed for chewing up billions of dollars in aid to Israel that they said could be better spent on students, in addition to a staggering loss of life. The second was disappointment with their parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, which they felt should go further in pressuring the Biden administration to rein in Israel’s military campaign.“I was disappointed in the resolution on Israel and Palestine because it didn’t call for an end to armed shipments,” said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher who attended the protest, alluding to a statement that the parent union endorsed at its convention in July.Since last fall, many rank-and-file union members have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,000 people and took about 250 hostages. The leaders of many national unions have appeared more cautious, at times emphasizing the precipitating role of Hamas.“We were very careful about what a moral stance was and also what the implications of every word we wrote was,” the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said of the resolution her union recently adopted.In some ways, this divide reflects tensions over Israel and Gaza that exist within many institutions — like academia, the media and government.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