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      A Campaign That Just Started Is Almost Over

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      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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      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

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      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

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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