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      At DNC 2024, Women Take Center Stage

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      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

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      Iran Is to Blame for Hacking Into Trump’s Campaign, Intelligence Officials Say

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      American intelligence agencies also confirmed that the effort extended to the Biden-Harris campaign, though that bid was unsuccessful.American intelligence agencies said on Monday that Iran was responsible for hacking into former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign and trying to breach the Biden-Harris campaign.The finding, which was widely expected, came days after a longtime Trump adviser, Roger J. Stone, revealed that his Hotmail and Gmail accounts had been compromised. That intrusion evidently allowed Iranian hackers to impersonate him and gain access to the emails of campaign aides.The announcement was the starkest indication to date that foreign intelligence organizations have mobilized to interfere in the 2024 election at a moment of heightened partisan polarization at home and escalating tensions abroad between Iran and Israel, along with its international allies, including the United States.“Iran seeks to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions,” intelligence officials wrote in a joint statement from the F.B.I., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.The Islamic Republic has “demonstrated a longstanding interest in exploiting societal tensions through various means,” the officials added.The joint statement provided no new details about the attacks, nor did it specify how the agencies knew Iran was responsible.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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      How The Times Is Covering the Democratic National Convention

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      Lisa Lerer, a New York Times politics reporter, will cover the D.N.C. with a host of colleagues, building a makeshift office at the event in Chicago.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Next week in Chicago, the Democratic National Convention will cap off a few tumultuous weeks for the Democratic Party: President Biden dropped out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris secured the nomination and soon selected her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in one of the fastest vetting processes in modern history.Lisa Lerer, a political correspondent who has reported on five presidential elections and joined The Times in 2018, has covered all the fast-breaking chaos this summer. She is part of a Times team of reporters, editors, photographers, audio journalists and I.T. specialists who will cover the D.N.C. from a “mobile office” inside the convention.In an interview, Ms. Lerer discussed how she focused her coverage for a multiday event like the D.N.C., which begins Monday, how The Times has prepared for the occasion and what she is looking forward to learning. This interview has been edited and condensed.What is the atmosphere going into the convention?There’s a ton of excitement for this convention. In 2020, Democrats had a virtual convention, which was largely like a television production because of the pandemic. Now we’re returning to a more standard convention, but it’s unique because the ticket was just picked in the past month. There are a lot of Democrats who are very anxious about this race and were anxious about President Biden’s prospects for months. And now there’s pent-up energy being released.There’s this unbelievable sense of enthusiasm in the party. There’s a level of energy that I think many of us who have covered politics for a while haven’t seen since, on the Democratic side, Obama ran in 2008.What are you doing to prepare? Are there certain lines of coverage you’re already thinking about?Normally you start planning for a convention several weeks out. This year that was really hard to do because there were so many things happening: the debate, which really scrambled the race. Then there was the period when it wasn’t clear whether Biden was going to remain on the ticket. Then there was an assassination attempt on Trump, and there was the Republican Convention, and then vice presidents were picked. An outrageous amount of transformative political events happened in a tight period of time.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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      U.S., Egypt and Qatar Say Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Will Resume Next Week

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      Top officials from the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar ended two days of talks in Doha aimed at trying to resolve remaining disagreements between Israel and Hamas.High-level talks to halt the war in Gaza ended without an immediate breakthrough on Friday, but the United States, Egypt and Qatar said the negotiations would continue next week as mediators raced to secure a truce that they hope will avert a wider regional conflagration.The announcement came after top American, Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials ended two days of talks in Doha, the Qatari capital, aimed at trying to resolve remaining disagreements between Israel and Hamas. U.S. and regional officials hope that movement in the negotiations will blunt or stop a widely anticipated Iranian-led retaliation for the killing of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, militant groups backed by Iran.U.S., Iranian and Israeli officials said on Friday said that Iran had decided to delay its reprisal against Israel to allow the mediators to continue working toward a cease-fire in Gaza.After the first day of talks ended on Thursday night, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, called the acting Iranian foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, to encourage Iran to refrain from any escalation given the cease-fire talks in Doha, according to two Iranian officials and three other officials familiar with the call who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Mr. Al Thani spoke with Mr. Bagheri Kani again on Friday, and both officials “stressed the need for calm and de-escalation in the region,” according to the Qatari Foreign Ministry. Mr. Bagheri Kani said in a statement that the Qatari prime minister had described the cease-fire negotiations on Thursday as being at a “sensitive” phase.On Friday, Egypt, Qatar and the United States said in a joint statement that the mediators had presented Israel and Hamas with “a bridging proposal” consistent with the terms laid out by President Biden on May 31 and later endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.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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      Abortion Rights Advocates Hit the D.N.C.: Free Vasectomies and an Inflatable IUD

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      This convention is likely to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.While delegates are in Chicago for next week’s Democratic National Convention, they will engage in the typical pageantry and traditions: They’ll vote for their nominee, pose for photos with elected officials, and show off their state with cool buttons or themed hats.They will also have the option of getting a free vasectomy or a medication abortion just blocks away.A mobile health center run by Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, which serves much of Missouri and part of southern Illinois, plans to park itself near the convention and offer those services early next week to anybody who makes an appointment, delegate or not. (There is so much interest in the vasectomy appointments, I’m told, there is already a waiting list.)It’s a way of showcasing how reproductive health care providers have had to get creative when operating in or near states like Missouri, which borders Illinois and has a near-total abortion ban.But it also underscores the way this convention, more than any other, is going to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.For years, many Democrats believed too much talk about abortion rights might drive away moderate or religious voters. Four years ago, at the Covid-dampened convention of 2020, President Biden did not utter the word abortion in his speech. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris (although she did refer briefly to racial injustice in “reproductive and maternal health care.”)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 Disappearing President Steps Back Into the Limelight

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      At a rally today, if it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world, he kept the focus on Trump.For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, President Biden stood silently onstage in Maryland, his hands folded and his body swaying ever so softly. On one side of him was Vice President Kamala Harris, heaping praise on him; hovering on the other side was Harris’s face again, emblazoned on a shirt worn by a member of the crowd.It was the pair’s first time onstage together since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. The appearance, three and a half weeks in the making, had great potential for awkwardness: an event for the Biden White House with the vibe of a Harris campaign rally.If it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world now, he kept the focus on Trump.“Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is,” Biden said, evoking a set of conservative policy plans drawn up by allies of former President Donald Trump, once he stepped to the microphone. “Beat the hell out of ’em.”Unburdened by the weight of defending democracy in an embattled presidential campaign, Biden joked repeatedly about his age — “I served in the Senate for 270 years!” — referred to former President Trump as “Donald Dump,” and delivered a line that had bedeviled him at the debate where his candidacy unraveled.“This time,” he said, “we finally beat big pharma.”It was a flash of a Biden who has not been seen much since he dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. He is no longer his party’s standard-bearer. He has not appeared on the campaign trail. He seems in many ways to have shrunk from public view.It all got me curious about what these past weeks have meant for Biden — a man who is, of course, very much still president. My colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, has watched Biden and Harris up close, and he spoke with me this afternoon from the event in Maryland. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.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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      Fumio Kishida, Japan’s Prime Minister, Will Step Down in September

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      News outlets said the prime minister would step aside next month, bowing to pressure within his party, which wants to move on from his unpopular leadership. Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, intends to step down next month, bowing to pressure within his party to move on from his unpopular leadership, news outlets reported.Mr. Kishida has informed officials in his administration of his intention not to run in a governing-party election in September, according to Japanese news outlets, including the national broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News. The winner of that election will become the prime minister.Mr. Kishida, who has been prime minister since 2021, will hold a news conference Wednesday morning, according to a spokesperson for his office.This is a developing story. More