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      Israel Rescues 4 Hostages in Assault That Killed Scores of Gazans

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      The news was met with jubilation in Israel, where tensions over the hostages’ safety have been rising in recent months.Israeli soldiers and special operations police rescued four hostages from Gaza on Saturday amid a heavy air and ground assault and flew them back to Israel by helicopter to be reunited with their families. The news was met with jubilation in Israel, where anxieties over the fate of the roughly 120 remaining captives have been rising after eight months of war.Residents in the town of Nuseirat, where the hostages were being held, reported intense bombardments during the rescue operation. Khalil al-Daqran, an official at a hospital in the city, told reporters that scores of Palestinians had been killed and that the hospital’s wards and corridors were packed with the wounded.Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, told reporters the rescue mission took place around 11 a.m. Saturday, when forces located the four hostages in two separate buildings where they were being held by Hamas militants. He said the Israeli forces came under fire but managed to extract the hostages in two helicopters. One special forces police officer died.The freed hostages — Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 — were kidnapped by Palestinian militants from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 250 taken hostage, Israel says. All four were in good medical condition and were transferred to a hospital in Israel for further examinations, the Israeli authorities said in a statement.Almog Meir Jan embracing loved ones on Saturday in Ramat Gan, Israel, in a photograph released by the Israeli Army.Israeli Army, via ReutersThe fate of the hostages has been a source of intense political pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, amid the broader criticism that his government, for its own reasons, is in no hurry to wind down the conflict or to address the issue of who should govern Gaza after the war.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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      Bidens Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families

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      Parents with children represent 40 percent of migrants who crossed the southern border this year. Now, they will be turned back within days, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.A new border crackdown unveiled by the Biden administration this week is likely to disproportionately affect families, whose soaring numbers in the last decade have drastically changed the profile of the population crossing the southern border.Family units have come to represent a substantial share of border crossers, accounting for about 40 percent of all migrants who have entered the United States this year. Families generally have been released into the country quickly because of legal constraints that prevent children from being detained for extended periods.They then join the millions of undocumented people who stay in the United States indefinitely, under the radar of the U.S. authorities, as they wait for court dates years in the future.But according to a memo issued by the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The New York Times, families will be returned to their home countries within days under President Biden’s new border policy, which temporarily closed the U.S.-Mexico border to most asylum seekers as of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.The implications of the new policy are enormous for families, who are some of the most vulnerable groups making the journey to the United States. Advocates warn that it could have dangerous repercussions, making parents more likely to separate from their children or send them alone to the border, because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the new policy.The vast majority of families seeking asylum are from Central America and Mexico, which places them in a category described in the memo as “easily removable,” akin to single adults from those regions. The memo lays out how the authorities are to carry out the new policy.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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      In Hunter Biden Trial, Focus Turns to the Biden Women

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      The women called to testify have at different times tried to support a man whose history of addiction continues to hit them with shrapnel.Naomi Biden Neal, Kathleen Buhle, Jill Biden and Hallie Biden attended Hunter Biden’s trial this week.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesOne by one, the women drifted into the courthouse: The wife. The ex-wife. The daughter. The sister-in-law who, through the fog of tragedy and drug abuse, ended up an ex-girlfriend.Once inside the courtroom, they locked their eyes past the many strangers who watched them — people who wondered if they would break down, or say the wrong thing. If they would cry.Hunter Biden is the one on criminal trial, staring down gun charges. But the spectacle in the courtroom has forced the Biden women into an uncomfortable spotlight.In the family, public life has often revolved around the men. The women called to testify had, at different points, tried to support and protect the one who was the troubled husband, father and son — and whose ruinous history of addiction continues to hit them with shrapnel. The women who didn’t speak sat in the courtroom, playing parts of nurturers and sentinels.The pain of this responsibility was written on the face of Hunter Biden’s eldest daughter, Naomi Biden Neal, who testified on his behalf on Friday.“He seemed great,” a nervous-sounding Ms. Biden Neal, dressed in black with her hair pulled back, told the court on Friday. “He seemed hopeful.”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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      Biden Says He Would Not Pardon His Son in Felony Gun Trial

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      In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News, the president touched on Hunter Biden’s trial, Donald Trump’s felony conviction and the war in Gaza.President Biden said on Thursday that he would not grant Hunter Biden a pardon if he was convicted in his felony gun trial, a rare comment from Mr. Biden about the legal troubles facing his son.When asked during an interview with ABC News whether he would accept the outcome of the trial of his son, who faces charges including lying on an application to obtain a gun in October 2018, Mr. Biden said, “Yes.”In the wide-ranging interview, the president also defended his border policies and reiterated his support for a cease-fire proposal in the war in Gaza. When the topic turned to former President Donald J. Trump and his recent felony conviction, Mr. Biden said his opponent needed to “stop undermining the rule of law.”Last week, a New York jury found Mr. Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money paid to a porn actress, in an unlawful conspiracy to aid his 2016 presidential campaign. He has since repeated his criticism of the judge in the case and suggested he could seek to prosecute his political opponents if elected again. At a campaign rally in Arizona on Thursday, Mr. Trump called his trial “rigged” and said the charges had been “fabricated.”Mr. Biden took on a sharper edge when asked about his political opponent’s broadsides after a recent executive order allowing the suspension of asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The former president called the move “weak and pathetic.”“Is he describing himself — weak and pathetic?” Mr. Biden said in the interview, which took place on the sidelines of his visit to the beaches of Normandy in France to observe the 80th anniversary of D-Day.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 Rails Against Border Crisis in First Campaign Event as a Felon

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      In his first campaign event since he became the first American president to be convicted on felony charges, Donald J. Trump on Thursday tried to turn the focus on President Biden by likening his border policy to a criminal enterprise.Broadly denouncing the migrants crossing the border illegally of being violent criminals and terrorists, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Biden’s recent executive order meant to curb crossings, saying it would be ineffective after Mr. Biden had taken little action for months.“With his actions on the border, Joe Biden is the ringleader of one the most vile criminal conspiracies of all time,” Mr. Trump said at a town hall in Phoenix hosted by Turning Point Action, a conservative group.Mr. Trump, whom prosecutors in Manhattan accused of a criminal conspiracy, and who is also facing felony conspiracy counts in a federal election-interference case, often defends himself from criticisms by dismissing the claims against him, then pointing fingers at his opponents and accusing them of worse transgressions.His speech in Phoenix previewed how Mr. Trump will most likely downplay the guilty verdict in his Manhattan trial by keeping immigration at the center of his efforts to persuade voters in battleground states to restore him to the White House in November, while defeating the man who thwarted his re-election in 2020.That strategy may prove particularly potent in Arizona, a border state that Mr. Trump had not visited since 2022. Republican lawmakers voted this week to put a measure on the ballot in November that would make unlawfully crossing the border from Mexico a state crime, part of an effort to harness anti-immigration sentiment at the polls.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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      Jill Biden Leaves France to Attend Hunter Biden’s Trial

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      The first lady’s departure from a high-profile foreign trip was a dramatic illustration of the Biden family’s personal priorities. She is expected to return to France on Saturday.Jill Biden, the first lady, left President Biden’s side in France on Thursday to make the trans-Atlantic trip back to Delaware, where Hunter Biden is standing trial on gun charges.The first lady is then scheduled to return to France for a state visit on Saturday, according to her communications director, Elizabeth Alexander.The departure of the first lady from a high-profile foreign trip was perhaps the most dramatic illustration yet of the Biden family’s personal priorities, which lie some 3,600 miles away from France, in Courtroom 4A of the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Del.Hunter Biden is on trial on charges of lying about his drug use on a form to buy a gun in October 2018, and of illegally possessing the weapon.The boomerang trip also says something about the resolve of the first lady, who is not a blood relative of Hunter Biden but who is the woman who raised him since he was a small child. Over time, she has become her family’s protective backbone.“I’m his mom,” she said in an interview in 2022, when Hunter Biden was the subject of a federal investigation. “I mean, I have to support him and love him, and, you know, I’m constantly talking to him, sending him texts; ‘How you doing?’ Because it’s tough.”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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      Biden Shut the Border to Asylum Seekers. The Question Is Whether the Order Can Be Enforced.

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      There are still ways for people to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, particularly without any new resources to help guard the 2,000-mile frontier.As of 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, the U.S. border with Mexico was shut down to nearly all migrants seeking asylum in the United States.The drastic action, the result of an executive order signed by President Biden, was designed to keep the border closed at least through Election Day and defuse one of the president’s biggest vulnerabilities in his campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.The question is how broadly it can be enforced, especially along a 2,000-mile border that does not have nearly the capacity to manage the number of people who want to enter the United States.As of Wednesday morning and into Thursday, the order appeared to be working, although it was still too early to make a real assessment. Migrants in the border towns of Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez were being turned away, and the word was spreading.In Mexicali, Guadalupe Olmos, a 33-year-old mother, said that when she heard about the new policy, she wept, and said it was now pointless to try to enter the United States. Last year, she said, gunmen shot up her car, killing her husband. She and her three children survived and have been trying to get out of Mexico.“It is not going to happen anymore,” Ms. Olmos said. “Yesterday, they told us that this is over.”Before the new restrictions went into effect, migrants would seek out border agents and surrender, knowing that anyone who stepped foot on U.S. soil could ask for asylum. Often, they would be released into the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to come up.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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      Hallie Biden Is a Key Witness in Hunter Biden Gun Trial

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      Hallie Biden, Mr. Biden’s ex-girlfriend and the widow of his brother, Beau, described his self-destructive behavior around the time he applied for a gun in 2018.Hallie Biden, a former girlfriend of Hunter Biden and widow of his brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, telling jurors that she saw him buy, stash and smoke vast amounts of crack cocaine in the fall of 2018 when he claimed to be drug-free on a firearms application.Ms. Biden — speaking in nervous, clipped bursts as she faced Mr. Biden across the fourth-floor courtroom — admitted that he had introduced her to crack in the summer of 2018. She said she was ashamed and embarrassed by their behavior when the two briefly lived together in a rented house in Annapolis, Md., a time when both were in shock over Beau Biden’s death.“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she said.Ms. Biden is, by far, the most important witness for the prosecution, offering the most detailed, and intimate, portrait of Mr. Biden’s reckless and self-destructive behavior at the time.Mr. Biden, she said, bought multiple rocks of crack in Washington, where he kept an apartment — some the size of “Ping-Pong balls, or bigger maybe” — and stored them in his “backpack or car.”Ms. Biden said she discovered the gun at the center of the case when she was rifling through Mr. Biden’s vehicle the morning after he showed up at her house. It was part of a “pattern” of erratic behavior, she added, saying he would be unreachable for weeks at a time and she or her children would scrounge through his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “start anew and deal with stuff” when he reappeared exhausted at her home.When she searched the car on Oct. 23, she described noticing “a dusting of powder” that she assumed to be “remnants of crack cocaine” before finding the gun in a case with a broken lock. Flustered, she said she improvised a way to dispose of it at a grocery store nearby.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