Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Syrian Druse Pilgrims Pay Rare Visit to Israel

      by

      As part of an effort to deepen its influence in southern Syria, Israel has been seeking stronger ties with the Druse religious minority that holds sway there.Syrian Druse pilgrims entered Israel from Syria in a rare visit to a shrine, and were welcomed by the local Druse community.ReutersA delegation of Syrian Druse made a rare trip to Israel this week and visited a shrine revered by the faith as Israel seeks to extend its influence inside Syria after the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.Both Israel and Syria have sizable communities of Druse — an Arabic-speaking religious minority scattered across the Levant region. But with the two countries formally at war for decades, Syrian Druse were generally unable to enter Israel to visit sites holy to their faith.Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, a Druse leader in Israel who helped organize the two-day visit, said roughly 100 people arrived on Friday in a convoy from Syrian territory. They visited the Tomb of the Prophet Shuaib in the northern Galilee region of Israel, a site holy to the sect.“After being cut off for decades, to see our people arriving in our country — it’s a moment of great joy,” said Mr. Tarif, adding that he knew most of the visitors only from phone conversations because of the great difficulty of traveling between the two countries.Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, wrote on social media that the pilgrimage was the first of its kind in decades.In Israel, many Druse hold Israeli passports, serve in the national military and are viewed as loyal “brothers in arms.” Other Druse who live in the Golan Heights, territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed, still consider themselves Syrian and tend to have Israeli residency cards, but not citizenship.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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      What Thom Tillis’s Surrender to Trump Says About the Trump G.O.P.

      by

      Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage. He delivered a doozy last month, challenging President Trump’s revisionist history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Vladimir Putin “a liar, a murderer” and “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”But Tulsi Gabbard is apparently no threat at all. Although she has been something of a Putin apologist, Tillis fell in line with 51 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and voted to confirm her as director of national intelligence. Afterward, on Facebook, he proclaimed his pride in supporting her.He made impassioned remarks in the Senate about his disagreement with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.But the following month, he voted to confirm Kash Patel, who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence, as director of the F.B.I.Courage, capitulation — Tillis pinballs dizzyingly between the two. As he gears up for a 2026 campaign for a third term in the Senate, he seems to be at war with himself. And perhaps more poignantly than any other Republican on Capitol Hill, Tillis, 64, illustrates how hard it is to be principled, independent or any of those other bygone adjectives in Trump’s Republican Party.That’s a compliment. For most Republicans in Congress, there’s no battle between conscience and supplication. They dropped to their knees years ago. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do. They praise Trump with their every word, including the conjunctions.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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Bardella, Leader of France’s Far-Right National Rally, Heads to Israel

      by

      As Jordan Bardella, its young president, tries to distance the party from its history of antisemitism, it is making common cause with Israel against “Islamist ideology.”Jordan Bardella, the young president of France’s far-right National Rally, plans to visit Israel this month in a powerful symbol of his party’s shift from the home of French antisemitism to the country’s most vociferous friend of the Jews.“Antisemitism is a poison,” Mr. Bardella told Le Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper, announcing that he plans to attend a Jerusalem conference on that subject in late March and visit areas of Israel attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. “Our engagement in this combat is absolute.”No leader of the far-right party, including its perennial presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has previously made an official visit to Israel. But the party’s stand against what it calls “Islamist ideology,” has led it to a sweeping embrace of Israel and the country’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. At the same time, the National Rally’s vehement anti-immigrant ideology, aimed particularly at Muslims, has earned it the support of some French Jews.No leader of the far-right party, including its perennial presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has previously made an official visit to Israel.Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty ImagesMany French Jews, however, remain steadfast in their opposition to the party. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent intellectual and author last year of the book “Israel Alone,” an impassioned paean to Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, immediately announced that he had dropped out of the Jerusalem conference because Mr. Bardella is going. He informed President Isaac Herzog of Israel of his decision.Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, which became the National Rally in 2018, famously dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail” of history and called the Nazi occupation of France “not particularly inhumane,” despite the deportation of more than 75,000 Jews to Hitler’s death camps.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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Why Trump’s Tesla Showcase Mattered to Elon Musk

      by

      A lot has changed since former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. snubbed Elon Musk at an event in 2021.It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk couldn’t even get an invitation to the White House.The year was 2021, and President Joe Biden was announcing tighter pollution rules and promoting his electric vehicle policies.Behind him on the lawn were gleaming examples — a Ford F-150 Lightning, a Chevrolet Bolt EV, a Jeep Wrangler — as well as the chief executives of the companies that made them. But the nation’s biggest electric vehicle producer was nowhere to be seen.“Seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk tweeted before the event.The Biden White House explained the snub by noting that the automakers that had been invited were the nation’s three largest employers of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful union, and it suggested that the administration would find other ways to partner with Tesla. (Union animus toward electric vehicles later became a problem for Biden.) But today, the moment is seen as a turning point in a feud between Musk and Biden that some Democrats say they have come to regret deeply.“They left Elon out,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who is working to get his party to embrace electric vehicles, “and now he hates ’em.”It was hard not to think about that episode yesterday when Musk and Trump lined up Teslas, including Cybertrucks, on the White House driveway and proceeded to rattle off their benefits like denizens of a suburban showroom.“I love the product,” Trump said.“Try it,” Musk said. “You’ll like it!”Musk now has the White House attention and promotion that he wanted several years ago — and with it, a pile of potential benefits for some of his companies — but it’s come at a price. He donated some $300 million largely through his own super PAC to help Trump get elected. My colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that he’s signaled a willingness to put another $100 million into groups controlled by Trump’s political operation.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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Europe Welcomes a Ukraine Cease-Fire Offer and a Revival of U.S. Aid

      by

      Europeans reacted with relief to the announcement on Tuesday that Ukraine had agreed with the United States on a 30-day cease-fire in its war with Russia and anxiously awaited Moscow’s response.They were relieved because Washington announced simultaneously that it would immediately restore military and intelligence support for Ukraine. And there was expectation that Russia must now respond in kind, or presumably President Trump would put some kind of pressure on Moscow analogous at least to the blunt instruments he used against Ukraine.“The ball is now in Russia’s court,” said the two European Union leaders, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, in coordinated messages on social media welcoming the deal and echoing the statement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.But in the same sentence the European leaders also welcomed the resumption of U.S. security support to Ukraine, giving it equal emphasis.“We welcome today’s news from Jeddah on the U.S.-Ukraine talks, including the proposal for a cease-fire agreement and the resumption of U.S. intelligence sharing and security assistance,” the message said on Tuesday. “This is a positive development that can be a step toward a comprehensive, just and lasting peace for Ukraine.”They also tried to remind Mr. Trump and his team that if Washington wants Europe to guarantee any peace deal in Ukraine, Europe wants to be at the negotiating table. “The European Union,” the message said (hint, hint), “is ready to play its full part, together with its partners, in the upcoming peace negotiations.”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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Why Rodrigo Duterte Was Arrested Now

      by

      Running parallel to Rodrigo Duterte’s transfer to the International Court of Justice in The Hague is a monthslong feud with the Philippines’ current president.The arrest warrant was delivered to President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines in Manila at 3 a.m. Monday. The person named on it: his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, the firebrand whose war on drugs left thousands of people dead.But acting on the warrant from the International Criminal Court was not straightforward, since the Philippines is not a member of the court. So at 6:30 a.m., Mr. Marcos’s government received another warrant for Mr. Duterte, this time from Interpol, which was acting on the court’s behalf and of which the Philippines is a member.Mr. Marcos recalled his next step in an address to the nation on Tuesday. “OK, we’ll put all our plans into place, and let’s proceed as we had discussed,” he relayed having told the head of his justice department.Just over 24 hours later, Mr. Duterte — who long seemed above the law — was arrested in Manila. By the end of Tuesday, he had been put on a plane bound for The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.It was a swift coda to a long chapter of impunity in the Philippines. Only a handful of people have been convicted in connection with the killings in Mr. Duterte’s drug war, in which as many as 30,000 are estimated to have died. Now, the man who publicly took credit for the carnage was being sent to a court of law to face justice, in part because of a shift in political winds.Mr. Marcos, the son of the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, rose to power after forming an alliance with Sara Duterte, a daughter of Mr. Duterte’s. Running on a platform of national unity, they won the presidency and vice presidency in 2022. But their marriage of convenience started unraveling quickly, driven by mistrust.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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Syria Violence Marked by Sectarian and Revenge Killings, War Monitor Says

      by

      The Syrian Network for Human Rights said armed groups and foreign fighters aligned with the government but not integrated into it were largely responsible for the sectarian violence.Armed groups and foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it were primarily responsible for sectarian massacres in Syria’s coastal region over the past week, a war monitoring group said in a new report.The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “watch the decisions made by the interim authorities” after hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days in areas dominated by the country’s Alawite religious minority. He added that Washington was concerned by “the recent deadly violence against minorities.”The ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad was an Alawite and some members of his minority community enjoyed a privileged status under his rule.The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s civil war, said in a report released late on Tuesday that the violence in recent days “included extrajudicial killings, field executions, and systematic mass killings motivated by revenge and sectarianism.”The clashes erupted almost a week ago in Latakia and Tartus Provinces — the Alawite heartland of Syria — between fighters aligned with the new government and Assad loyalists. The new government is led by Islamist former rebels who fought Mr. al-Assad in a 13-year civil war.The violence was triggered when pro-Assad militants ambushed security forces last Thursday and killed more than a dozen of them. The government then poured security forces into the coastal region.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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Elon Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Into Trump Political Operation

      by

      Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.Over the weekend, Mr. Musk traveled to and from Florida aboard Air Force One with Mr. Trump, and posted on his social media website, X, that he had dinner with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday night after some tense interactions earlier in the week.And on Tuesday, as Mr. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, faced some violent protests around the globe, Mr. Trump made a display of having five Teslas brought to the White House grounds in a demonstration for the news media, and checked out the cars with Mr. Musk by his side. It was an extraordinary promotion of a company by the most powerful person in the federal government.“I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people,” Mr. Trump told reporters, referring to Mr. Musk. “And I just want people to know that he can’t be penalized for being a patriot.”Mr. Musk and White House officials didn’t return a request for comment.Associates of both Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have talked in recent days about Mr. Musk’s planned donation to a Trump-controlled entity. Mr. Musk has signaled he wants to make the donations not to his own super PAC, which is called America PAC and has spent heavily on Mr. Trump in the past, but to an outside entity affiliated with the president.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