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    Conclusiones de las elecciones estatales en el este de Alemania

    El partido ultraderechista Alternativa para Alemania tuvo una noche muy exitosa en dos estados, a pesar de que sus capítulos estatales fueron clasificados como “extremistas” por la inteligencia alemana.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El partido de ultraderecha Alternativa para Alemania, o AfD, tuvo una noche muy exitosa en dos estados del este de Alemania el domingo. Casi un tercio de los electores votaron por el partido, cuyos capítulos estatales han sido clasificados como “extremistas confirmados” por la inteligencia nacional alemana.Pero aunque un partido de extrema derecha tenga tanto éxito en dos estados alemanes menos de ocho décadas después del final de la Alemania nazi es simbólicamente tenso, es probable que solo tenga un impacto limitado en la política nacional alemana. Aunque el domingo un número récord de votantes acudió a las urnas en los dos estados, solo alrededor del 7 por ciento de todos los alemanes podía votar.Tampoco se espera que la AfD encuentre aliados fácilmente. Todos los demás partidos que obtuvieron escaños en las cámaras estatales el domingo se han comprometido a no colaborar con la extrema derecha, en una estrategia que alienará aun más a los votantes de extrema derecha, pero que pretende garantizar la estabilidad democrática en el gobierno.Aun así, las elecciones tendrán efectos dominó difíciles de predecir, sobre todo en el éxito de un partido de extrema izquierda que no existía el año pasado. En Turingia, el más pequeño de los dos estados, casi la mitad de los votantes se decantaron por partidos extremistas, lo que obligará a los partidos a hacer difíciles concesiones en las próximas semanas si sus líderes quieren crear un gobierno estable y operativo.En Sajonia, donde la Unión Cristianodemócrata (CDU) obtuvo el primer puesto, las cosas son algo más sencillas, en parte porque los Verdes y los Socialdemócratas podrían conservar un papel en un gobierno minoritario.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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    Israelis Go on Strike After Hostage Deaths, and German Far Right Makes Election Gains

    Listen to and follow “The Headlines”Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioPatrick Kingsley and Jessica Metzger and On Today’s Episode:Workers Strike as Israelis Seethe Over Hostage Killings, by Patrick KingsleyTakeaways From East Germany’s State Elections, by Christopher F. SchuetzeHow a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients, by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie ThomasA Funnel Cake Macchiato, Anyone? The Coffee Wars Are Heating Up, by Julie CreswellA protest outside a military compound in Tel Aviv on Sunday. Many demonstrators on Sunday demanded that Israel reach a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesTune in, and tell us what you think at theheadlines@nytimes.com. For corrections, email nytnews@nytimes.com.For more audio journalism and storytelling, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Special thanks to More

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    China Dominates the Situation Room But Not the Campaign Trail

    The thorny issues raised by America’s most potent geopolitical challenge are reduced to platitudes.Good evening! Tonight, my colleague David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, is here with a look at what we are not hearing on the campaign trail about the nation’s biggest geopolitical challenge: China.Ask President Biden — or just about anyone in the national security firmament of the United States — about America’s most potent geopolitical challenge over the next few decades, and you are bound to get a near-unanimous answer: China.The argument is familiar. The United States has never before faced a competitor who challenges it on so many fronts. Xi Jinping’s China is America’s only real technological competitor, in everything from artificial intelligence to semiconductors, electric cars to biological sciences. The country has more than doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal in the past few years, and a new partnership it has formed with Russia could upend every assumption about how America defends itself.Then there’s the economy. If, a few years ago, American economists worried about China’s rapid rise, today they worry about its slowdown, and the overhang of industrial production that is flooding the world with excess goods, with potentially disastrous consequences.There’s also the very real risk of war over Taiwan. There’s TikTok. The list goes on.Yet when the issue comes up on the campaign trail at all, it’s framed chiefly as an economic threat. Thornier discussions of China’s role as a broad strategic competitor, with ambitions that are already forcing the United States to change how it prepares its workers, shapes its investments and restructures its defenses, have fallen largely by the wayside.China has fallen victim to what I call Situation Room-Campaign Trail disequilibrium. It works something like this: If there is a topic that is fixating Washington policymakers, it’s usually a good bet no one is talking about it, except in platitudes, on the campaign trail.This week was a prime example. While the campaign roared along, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was in Beijing, meeting with President Xi on a range of urgent issues, including China’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.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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    The Kamala Harris Interview Worth Revisiting Now

    ‘She didn’t break eye contact. It was intense. You feel on trial.’Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will sit down with Dana Bash of CNN tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern for the first major television interview of their presidential campaign.It’s a high-stakes moment for their nascent candidacy, a chance to define their campaign, defend their ideas and test their political dexterity in the run-up to Harris’s debate against former President Donald Trump on Sept. 10.It’s also an opportunity, following a month of rallies and campaign speeches, for the pair to tell a deeper story about themselves and their vision.But getting them to do that might not be easy.My colleague Astead Herndon, friend of the newsletter and host of the podcast “The Run-Up,” interviewed Harris as part of his reporting for a profile he wrote of Harris last year.The interview was contentious, but revealing, too, and I think it’s worth revisiting now. I called Astead to ask him what it taught him, and what he’s looking for from Harris’s interview tomorrow. Our conversation was edited and condensed.JB: Astead, thank you for joining me! You’ve held sit-down interviews with Harris twice, once in 2019 and once in 2023. How were those two interviews different?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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    The Big Border Change Harris Isn’t Talking About

    A Biden administration border policy that has had a dramatic impact isn’t getting campaign play.Good evening. Tonight, my colleague Hamed Aleaziz, who covers immigration, looks at why the sharp drop in border crossings isn’t playing a bigger role in the presidential campaign. Plus, I want to hear about your favorite books about politics. — Jess BidgoodThe situation at the southern border looks very different these days.Gone are the headlines about surging border crossings crushing border communities and cities like New York struggling to fund housing for migrants who recently came to the country.The reality is that the numbers at the southern border have dropped to levels not seen before in the Biden administration — and lower than they were during parts of the Trump administration.The dramatic drop in border crossings came after a Biden administration policy seen by White House officials as a major success for an administration that has spent three years fighting Republican attacks over its handling of surging border crossings.Vice President Kamala Harris, however, has not focused on the dramatic change at the southern border in her presidential campaign. Tonight, I’ll explain what’s happening at the border, and offer some theories about why Harris isn’t talking it up.A border shutdown that workedThe border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation.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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    Democrats Look to End the Electability Question

    The party is battling a squishy, often self-reinforcing concept about the perceived ability to win.This year, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, Md., and a Democrat, sought support for her U.S. Senate bid from an elected official she had known for years.“She said to me, ‘I’m so sorry. I want to be really blunt with you, Angela,’” Alsobrooks, who is Black, said, recalling that the official, a fellow Democrat whom she did not name, said she thought Alsobrooks could not win. “We are not ready to elect a Black woman in the state of Maryland,” Alsobrooks recounted the official as saying.It turned out that Maryland Democrats were ready to do just that.Alsobrooks beat a white man in her Senate primary by more than 10 percentage points. Public polling has shown her leading another, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, whom she will face in November.But the exchange, which Alsobrooks described in an interview last week during the Democratic National Convention, underscores the way a party that is trying to elect the first Black female president is still battling anxieties about the idea of electability — and preparing to confront them.Electability — a squishy and often self-reinforcing concept about who is perceived as being able to win elections — was a through line of the Democratic primary in 2020, when voters stung by the 2016 election wrung their hands over whether preferred presidential candidates who were female, nonwhite or both could garner enough support in key battleground states. The party ultimately coalesced around Joe Biden.Democrats did not have a chance to air those concerns in a drawn-out primary in 2024, and many suggested last week that identity-based questions about electability should remain firmly in the past. They view the issue of electability as providing cover for racist and sexist notions about white voters being apprehensive about backing Black candidates and male voters being reluctant to vote for female candidates.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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    A Campaign That Just Started Is Almost Over

    Here’s my road map to the campaign’s remaining 74 days. If you blink, you might miss it.When Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at the Democratic National Convention last night, she did not linger on her party’s bliss over the events of the past month. She used the opening words of the biggest speech of her life to change the subject.“OK,” Harris said. “Let’s get to business.”Harris’s crisp opening reflected the urgency of the clock, but also the hard reality of a hyper-compressed political calendar: Her presidential campaign is almost over, even though it has just begun, and both she and former President Donald Trump have hardly a second to waste in a close race.Because Harris has been atop her party’s ticket for only about a month, she and Trump have sprinted in a matter of days through campaign elements that normally take months. Harris has raced to define herself and her candidacy, running a campaign heavy on rallies and light on policy and taking questions from the press. Trump, who built a campaign premised on defeating President Biden, has struggled to change up his attacks. And now, with both conventions done and dusted, comes everything else.Much will be packed into the next 74 days, and much can change in that time. If your head is spinning, dear reader, I get it. Mine too! Here’s my road map to the rest of the campaign. If you blink, you might miss it.Coming up next: the summer doldrums.Ah, finally. The presidential race is set. It’s summertime. Candidates and voters can take a minute to breathe before the fall campaign ramps up.For like, two days.Harris is heading home to Washington this weekend, my colleagues Reid Epstein and Katie Rogers report. Trump, who is campaigning today in Las Vegas and Glendale, Ariz., also has no campaign rallies planned for Saturday and Sunday. That might be all the peace and quiet we get before …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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    At DNC 2024, Women Take Center Stage

    Every night, some of the most famous men in politics seemed to play more of a supporting role.When State Senator Cordell Cleare of New York watched Michelle Obama, the former first lady, speak onstage at the Democratic National Convention this week, she heard a call to action — “Do something” — that thrilled and galvanized the Democrats around her.“Michelle Obama,” Cleare said, “dropped the mic.”She had a more restrained review for Obama’s husband.“President Obama gave good advice,” Cleare said of Barack Obama, who made his party swoon 16 years ago.This year’s D.N.C., which will close tonight with the biggest speech of Vice President Kamala Harris’s career, has made it very clear that, as Democrats tell the story of their party, it’s women who stand at center stage.Every night, women have outshined male party stalwarts — sometimes the ones they are married to — in a development that has highlighted the rising power of women in the Democratic Party and left some of the most famous men in politics seemingly playing more of a supporting role.“You hear the eloquent voice of Michelle Obama. I thought Secretary Clinton gave one of the best speeches I’ve heard her deliver in her career,” said Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, himself a talented orator whose soaring speech on Monday you might have forgotten amid all the big-ticket women, including Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state to whom he was referring.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