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    How Food Prices Have Changed During the Biden Administration

    Grocery prices are no longer rising as rapidly, but food inflation remains a top issue for voters, polls show.A central issue has plagued the Biden administration for most of its term: the steep rise in grocery prices.Polls have consistently found that inflation remains a top concern for voters, who have seen their budgets squeezed. A YouGov poll published last month found that 64 percent of Americans said inflation was a “very serious problem.” And when it comes to inflation, several surveys suggested that Americans were most concerned about grocery prices.Despite the gloom about grocery costs, food price increases have generally been cooling for months. On Wednesday, new data on inflation for July will show if the trend has continued.Economists in a Bloomberg survey think that inflation overall probably climbed by 3 percent from a year earlier, in line with a 3 percent rise in June. That sort of reading would probably keep officials at the Federal Reserve on track to cut interest rates in September. Investors, who were recently rattled by signs of an economic slowdown, have looked to rate cuts as a support for markets.Some voters have blamed President Biden for rising prices, pointing out that food costs have soared over the past four years. Former President Donald J. Trump, when accepting the Republican nomination last month, highlighted grocery costs and said that he would “make America affordable again.”In the year through June, grocery prices rose 1.1 percent, a significant slowdown from a peak of 13.5 percent in August 2022. Many consumers might not be feeling relief, though, because food prices overall have not fallen but have continued to increase, albeit at a slower rate. Compared with four years ago, grocery prices are up about 20 percent.

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    Annual change in grocery prices for U.S. consumers
    Year-over-year change in average for “food at home” index, not seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesWe 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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    Así es la estrategia de Kamala Harris en materia de migración

    La candidata demócrata ha sido vapuleada por Trump y otros por su historial en materia migratoria. Ahora está probando un enfoque que, según los demócratas, ya ha funcionado antes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Durante semanas, los republicanos se han dedicado a atacar a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris por el tema migratorio, culpándola de las políticas del presidente Joe Biden en la frontera.Ahora, Harris, la candidata presidencial demócrata, está tratando de neutralizar esa línea de ataque, una de sus mayores debilidades ante los votantes, con una serie de estrategias que los demócratas aseguran que les han funcionado en las últimas elecciones y con la postura más contundente que ha mostrado hasta ahora como una fiscala estricta con la delincuencia y dedicada a proteger la frontera.Esta semana, contraatacó con la promesa de aumentar la seguridad fronteriza de resultar elegida y criticó a su oponente republicano, el expresidente Donald Trump, por ayudar a acabar con un acuerdo fronterizo bipartidista en el Congreso. Además, su campaña ha dado marcha atrás en algunas de las posturas más progresistas que adoptó durante su candidatura a la nominación demócrata en 2019, entre ellas su postura de que los migrantes que cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos sin autorización no deberían enfrentar sanciones penales.“Fui fiscala general de un estado fronterizo”, dijo el viernes Harris, quien fue fiscala superior de California, en un mitin en Arizona, un estado pendular donde la inmigración es una de las principales preocupaciones de los votantes.“Perseguí a las bandas transnacionales, a los cárteles de la droga y a los traficantes de personas. Los procesé, caso por caso, y gané”, dijo.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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    Trump Flew on Charter Jet Previously Owned by Jeffrey Epstein

    Former President Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign said on Monday that it was unaware that a private plane used by Mr. Trump for campaign travel on Saturday was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender.Mr. Trump flew from Bozeman, Mont., to Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo., on the jet, made by Gulfstream, to attend campaign fund-raisers after Mr. Trump’s signature Boeing 757, often referred to as Trump Force One, experienced a mechanical issue en route to a campaign rally in Bozeman on Friday.A Trump campaign official said that the campaign had called its charter jet vendor, Private Jet Services Group, after the mechanical failure to get a plane that could ferry the former president, and that the charter service had provided the Gulfstream jet. The official added that the campaign had used that private jet service as a vendor for years, and that it would take efforts to avoid using that plane in the future.A representative for Elevate Aviation Group, which owns Private Jet Services Group, hung up on a phone call requesting a comment about the aircraft. Other phone calls and text messages were not answered.Over the weekend, viral social media posts highlighted the apparent connection to Mr. Epstein. A report by The Miami Herald on Monday matched the charter plane’s tail number to a Gulfstream jet once owned by Mr. Epstein.Mr. Epstein’s planes have long been a source of public interest; he was known to travel with high-profile passengers, including Bill Clinton, Mr. Trump, Prince Andrew and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running for president as an independent candidate. Mr. Epstein also brought young women — and girls, according to some who accused Mr. Epstein of sex trafficking — to entertain guests on board.Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein had routinely crossed paths over the decades, attending many of the same social events and being photographed together in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Trump spoke enthusiastically about their relationship in the years before Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to charges of unlawful sex with minors. In 2002, Mr. Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.”Speaking in the Oval Office in 2019, Mr. Trump distanced himself from Mr. Epstein, saying that he’d “had a falling out with him.”“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” he added. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” More

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    Inside the Three Worst Weeks of Trump’s Campaign

    Rob SzypkoClare ToeniskoetterDiana Nguyen and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeFor much of the past year, Donald J. Trump and those around him were convinced that victory in the presidential race was all but certain. Now, everything has changed, after the decision by President Biden not to seek a second term.Jonathan Swan, who covers the Trump campaign for The New York Times, discusses the former president’s struggle to adjust to his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.On today’s episodeJonathan Swan, who covers politics and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The New York Times.Former President Donald J. Trump held a hastily scheduled news conference on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingPeople around the former and would-be president see a candidate disoriented by his new opponent.At a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump tried to wrestle back the public’s attention.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman. More

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    Trump Campaign Says It Was Hacked by Iranians, but Details Are Murky

    For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.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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    Trump Falsely Claims Harris’s Rally Crowds Are A.I.-Generated

    Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.The crowds at Ms. Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets, including The New York Times, and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Mr. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump has struggled to find his political footing in the weeks since President Biden decided to step aside and Ms. Harris replaced him atop the Democratic ticket: Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity at a conference for Black journalists, he later attacked Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor in the key swing state of Georgia, and he has seen new polling that puts him behind Ms. Harris in several key states.The Harris campaign has begun to mock Mr. Trump for his frustration over her crowds, one of which, it said, topped 15,000 people at an event in the Phoenix area on Friday.“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, said to the crowd, receiving a loud cheer.In his posts on Sunday, Mr. Trump drew parallels between his false claims of fake crowds and his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.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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    Harris Appeals to Tech Leaders in a Return to San Francisco

    A Sunday fund-raiser offered Vice President Kamala Harris a chance to turn the page on a sometimes frosty relationship between President Biden and Silicon Valley.Joe Biden who?Vice President Kamala Harris, whose political career was born in San Francisco two decades ago, on Sunday returned to the city for the first time since clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, hoping to reset relations with a tech community that has soured some on President Biden.It was a turning of the page and a homecoming all at once. Ms. Harris’s late-morning event raised $13 million from the region’s white-collar establishment that counts her as their own.But her trip was as much a rally as a fund-raiser, with about 700 people piling into the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. On one of this city’s quintessentially brisk, foggy August mornings, these wealthy givers waited in a queue that snaked up the hill, an indignity that would be unheard-of at a typical fund-raiser at a cozy private home in Woodside or Menlo Park. (Some donors with a connection or two found a way, as they do, to skip the line.)As is often the case in the highly choreographed world of presidential fund-raising, where egos must be treated tenderly, there was a series of receptions before the fund-raiser (with blue, pink and green wristbands) that clearly delineated the pecking order of big donors and their influence. Ms. Harris dropped in on each one, in descending order of price and intimacy, as donors enjoyed peach mimosas and shrimp cocktails before her remarks in the grand ballroom.“This is a room full of dear, dear, dear friends,” she said, standing before a giant “Harris Walz” sign and four flags: two American and two California.Mr. Biden has struggled for financial support from the Bay Area dating to his 2020 presidential campaign, when his list of fund-raisers was heavy on Obama-era ambassadors but light on the billionaire leaders of the tech industry.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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    Scofflaws and Other Hazards on the Roads

    More from our inbox:Neo-Nazis in Nashville and the Speech QuestionVance vs. the Rule of LawA Ban on Masks? Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Traffic Stops Fell in Pandemic, and Didn’t Return” (The Upshot, front page, Aug. 1):Thank you for highlighting the public health crisis that is the rise in traffic deaths across the United States. One point not made is the burden on our children. Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death of children, second to firearms. In my city, Philadelphia, five children, on average, are hit by a car every week.As a pediatric resident physician, I see the devastating outcomes of these statistics in the emergency room and intensive care unit. I advise children to wear a seatbelt, look both ways before crossing a road and wear a helmet when cycling. But people are getting killed even when they do everything right.Plastic bollards separating a designated bike lane don’t work when drivers are willing to barrel over them.We need an evidence-based approach to this public health crisis. Safe road design saves lives. We need to invest in Vision Zero programs to fund structural changes, including speed cameras and physical barriers between cyclists and drivers. Cities need to invest in public transit systems.Culture change takes time. Structural change in the meantime is evidence-based and will work to make all Americans, including our children, safer.Allison NeesonPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:The degree to which American drivers have been ignoring traffic laws over the past several years is mind-blowing. Speeding on highways and parkways is out of control and makes driving an exercise in avoiding catastrophe. It seems as if every other car is drag racing or trying to set a new speed record.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