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      Ukraine’s Parliament Approves Biggest Tax Hike of War to Support the Army

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      The authorities are resorting to a politically unpopular move as they scramble to raise funds for the grueling military effort against Russia.The Ukrainian Parliament voted on Thursday to approve its biggest tax hike since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than two years ago, resorting to a politically unpopular move to raise funds for its grueling war effort.The bill increases a tax on personal income that raises money for military expenditure, raising the rate to 5 percent, from 1.5 percent. It also retroactively doubles taxes on bank profits, to 50 percent for this year, and raises taxes on the profits of other financial institutions to 25 percent, from 18 percent, among other provisions.The tax rise approved on Thursday will help to fund a $12 billion military spending increase for this year. Yaroslav Zhelezniak, deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on finance, tax and customs policy, called it a “historic tax increase.”The move is likely to hit hard in Ukraine, where people have already seen their economic well-being plummet because of the war. But the authorities argue that they have no choice if Ukraine is to sustain its fight against Russia, which has ramped up its own military expenditure. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is expected to ratify the bill in the coming days.Oleksii Movchan, a member of Mr. Zelensky’s party and the deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on economic development, acknowledged that the bill was “unpopular.”“We will be hated, but we don’t have any other option,” he said. “It’s about our survival in this 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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      What to Know: How Israel Could Retaliate Against Iran

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      Iran has a number of sensitive sites, including oil infrastructure, military installations and nuclear facilities.Iran and Israel avoided direct confrontation for years, fighting a shadow war of secret sabotage and assassinations. But the two countries are now moving closer to open conflict, after the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon this week and Tehran’s ballistic missile barrage on Israel, its second in less than six months.Israel seems prepared to strike Iran directly, in a more vigorous and public way than it has before. Iran has a number of sensitive targets, including oil production sites, military bases and nuclear sites.Here’s an overview of what an Israeli attack could look like.Iran’s oil industry More

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      America Needs a President

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      Last week’s column was devoted to uncertainties about how the next president would handle the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, where America’s proxy and ally is slowly losing ground to Russia, while the United States seems trapped by its commitment to a maximal victory and unable to pivot to a strategy for peace.One could argue that the Middle East suddenly presents the opposite situation for the United States: After the last two weeks of warmaking and targeted assassinations, the position of our closest ally seems suddenly more secure, while our enemies look weaker and more vulnerable. Israel is dealing blow after blow to Hezbollah and Iran’s wider “axis of resistance,” the Iranian response suggests profound limits to their capacities, and the regional balance of power looks worse for America’s revisionist rivals than it did even a month ago.Look deeper, though, and both the strategic deterioration in Eastern Europe and the strategic improvement in the Middle East have something important in common. In both cases, the American government has found itself stuck in a supporting role, unable to decide upon a clear self-interested policy, while a regional power that’s officially dependent on us sets the agenda instead.In Ukraine this is working out badly because the government in Kyiv overestimated its own capacities to win back territory in last year’s counteroffensive. In the Middle East it’s now working out better for U.S. interests because Israeli intelligence and the Israeli military have been demonstrating a remarkable capacity to disrupt, degrade and destroy their foes.In neither case, though, does the world’s most powerful country seem to have a real handle on the situation, a plan that it’s executing or a clear means of setting and accomplishing its goals.Or as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, as Israel takes the fight to Hezbollah, “the Biden administration increasingly resembles a spectator, with limited insight into what its closest Middle East ally is planning — and lessened influence over its decisions.”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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      JD Smirks His Way Into the Future

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      When I’ve covered the campaigns of women on presidential tickets, the question invariably arises: “Is she tough enough to be commander in chief?”With the bubbly Geraldine Ferraro, a lot of voters had their doubts.There was less worry with Hillary Clinton. She was a gold-plated hawk who voted to let President George W. Bush invade Iraq and persuaded President Barack Obama to join in bombing Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.It is not surprising, with cascading conflicts, that Republicans are leveling the toughness question at Kamala Harris. This week the Trump/Vance campaign released an ad called “Weakness.” (Donald Trump also ran an ad called “Weakness” against Nikki Haley, a hawk.)The ad’s subtext is clearly gender, trying to exploit Kamala’s problems winning over Black and white working-class men.In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing — a lot better than Trump does — and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: “America doesn’t need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us.”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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      Israel Targets Hezbollah as Khamenei, Iran’s Leader, Warns of Retaliation

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      Israel is drastically widening its fight against the Lebanese militant group that is backed by Iran, whose supreme leader said that “any strike on the Zionist regime is a service to humanity.”Less than a week after Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli warplanes bombarded areas south of Beirut around midnight on Thursday, this time targeting his presumed successor.It was unclear on Friday whether the strikes in Lebanon had succeeded in killing the group’s potential next leader, Hashem Safeiddine, who is also a cousin of Mr. Nasrallah’s. And it was difficult to assess the scale of the damage from the bombardment, described as the heaviest of the rapidly escalating war in Lebanon.But it was clear from the images of destroyed buildings, now merely broken concrete and twisted metal, along with Israel’s ground invasion in the south, that Israel was determined to take the fight against Hezbollah to a new level.It’s doing so not just in southern Lebanon, where its ground invasion is seeking to halt Hezbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel, but also with its systematic targeting of the Iran-backed group’s remaining leaders, whose movements Israeli intelligence apparently still track.Many people in Lebanon and the broader Middle East had long feared that such a war was coming, even before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that began the war in Gaza. Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel shortly afterward in solidarity with Hamas, an ally.Over the past three weeks, Israel has stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies owned by its members, dropping bunker-busting bombs on Lebanese sites where the group’s leaders were thought to be meeting and assassinating Mr. Nasrallah and other Hezbollah commanders.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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      Humberto Ortega, Former Military Chief in Nicaragua, Dies at 77

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      Mr. Ortega, the estranged brother of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, had been under house arrest for months after making statements that infuriated his sibling.Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and younger brother of the current president, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule only to wind up under house arrest, died on Monday, the Nicaraguan government announced. He was 77.Mr. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement. He died at a military hospital in the country’s capital, Managua.Mr. Ortega was a key member of the leftist Sandinista Front that in 1979 toppled the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.Along with his brother, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s current president, he was a member of the nine-man directorate that ruled Nicaragua during a civil war against the U.S.-backed rebels known as the contras that lasted throughout the 1980s.In announcing his death, the government acknowledged his “strategic contribution” as a Sandinista, a movement he joined as an adolescent.“He was known as one of the most important military strategists during the insurrection,” said Mateo Jarquín, a Nicaragua historian at Chapman University in California.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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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.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 Military Video Shows Nasrallah Likely Killed by 2,000-Pound Bomb

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      A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting specialist who also reviewed the video, agreed with the analysis. In text messages with The Times, he said the bombs were “exactly what I would expect” to be used in what Israel has said was an attack on Mr. Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s underground headquarters.In May, the Biden administration announced it had paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concerns over civilian safety in Gaza.The video, published Saturday on the Israeli military’s official Telegram channel with the caption “Israeli Air Force Fighter Jets Involved in the Elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s Central Headquarters in Lebanon,” shows at least eight planes in a row armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Some are too far away to clearly identify the exact model, but the closer planes are seen armed with BLU-109 bombs. That model of bomb is also identifiable when the video shows two planes taking off, with one plane carrying six of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.Israel Defense Forces via Telegram More