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      Gaza Debate Reopens Divisions Between Left-Wing Workers and Union Leaders

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      Last week’s Democratic National Convention surfaced differences over the war in Gaza that could widen fissures between labor activists and union officials.When members of the Chicago Teachers Union showed up to march at the Democratic National Convention last week, many expressed two distinct frustrations.The first was over the war in Gaza, which they blamed for chewing up billions of dollars in aid to Israel that they said could be better spent on students, in addition to a staggering loss of life. The second was disappointment with their parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, which they felt should go further in pressuring the Biden administration to rein in Israel’s military campaign.“I was disappointed in the resolution on Israel and Palestine because it didn’t call for an end to armed shipments,” said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher who attended the protest, alluding to a statement that the parent union endorsed at its convention in July.Since last fall, many rank-and-file union members have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,000 people and took about 250 hostages. The leaders of many national unions have appeared more cautious, at times emphasizing the precipitating role of Hamas.“We were very careful about what a moral stance was and also what the implications of every word we wrote was,” the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said of the resolution her union recently adopted.In some ways, this divide reflects tensions over Israel and Gaza that exist within many institutions — like academia, the media and government.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 Arlington, Trump Returns to the Politics of the ‘Forever Wars’

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      The 2024 presidential race is the first in 24 years without a major American ground war, but Donald J. Trump continues to stoke division over the post-9/11 conflicts that helped give rise to his movement.Follow along with the latest election updates as Harris and Trump hit the campaign trail.The extraordinary altercation on Monday between Trump campaign aides and an Arlington National Cemetery official over political photography on sacred military ground is playing out in a hyperpartisan moment when war records and former President Donald J. Trump’s respect for military service are already up for debate.But the conflict at Arlington Cemetery’s Section 60, reserved for those recently killed in America’s wars abroad, points to a deeper issue for Mr. Trump and his core foreign policy identity: The 2024 presidential campaign between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris is the first in 24 years to unfold without an active American ground war.Mr. Trump’s rise in 2016 signified a major break from the foreign policy orthodoxy of both major parties, which believed in a U.S.-led internationalism and the projection of force abroad, whether it was the wars launched by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq or the conflicts embraced by Democrats to thwart ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia and to end a dictatorship in Libya. That year, it was the Republican, Mr. Trump, who spoke of ending war, and the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, who bore the unpopular mantle of military aggression with her vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq and her muscular diplomacy as secretary of state.Mr. Trump has used the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan during the Biden administration to resurrect his critiques of the “forever wars” that in part powered his movement. Now, he warns of a looming “World War III,” promises to end the war in Ukraine before he is inaugurated and brags that his relationships with authoritarian leaders like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea will restore stability and allow him to focus on securing domestic tranquillity.Mr. Trump is the candidate of peace through strength, said Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, while Ms. Harris is “the candidate of war because as ‘the last person in the room’ with Biden before the Afghanistan debacle, we are closer than ever to a world war than any other time in the last 50 years.”But to Mr. Trump’s political opponents, his arguments are having trouble sticking in part because voters do not believe his warnings of imminent American warfare.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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      Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, Will Visit China Next Week

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      A final meeting between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is also likely to come up.Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser at the White House, will travel to China next week to meet with Wang Yi, the country’s foreign minister, in their latest high-level meeting aimed at defusing tensions.“These meetings are consistent with efforts to maintain this strategic channel of communication to responsibly manage the relationship,” said Sean Savett, a spokesman for the National Security Council.Mr. Sullivan’s visit will be his fifth face-to-face meeting with Mr. Wang but his only trip to Beijing since the start of the Biden administration. It will also be the first by a U.S. national security adviser since Susan Rice traveled to China on behalf of President Barack Obama in 2016.A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment on diplomatic discussions, said Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Wang would discuss potential issues of cooperation, such as efforts to limit the spread of fentanyl, as well as areas where the two countries are locked in disputes, including the future of Taiwan.A final meeting between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, before the end of Mr. Biden’s term is likely to come up. The two last spoke this spring, after a meeting in California in November.Meetings last year between Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Wang helped restart diplomatic relations between the two countries after a rocky period that included Mr. Biden’s order to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the United States in early 2023.But despite a series of high-level conversations since then that have somewhat eased tensions, the United States and China remain in what the Biden administration calls a competitive posture.The administration has also expressed frustration with China’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its lack of condemnation of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed more than 1,200 people, including Americans.The administration official said on Friday that Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Wang would also discuss military-to-military communications between the two countries, which were suspended for months after the balloon episode. And the official said the two men would talk about ways to cooperate on ensuring safety and minimizing the risks of artificial intelligence in the future.The meeting — and a potential final summit involving Mr. Biden — comes just months before a U.S. election in which voters will choose a new president and potentially shift policy toward China, especially if former President Donald J. Trump returns to the White House for a second term.The official who spoke to reporters on Friday said Mr. Sullivan would not try to speak for a future administration or its policies toward China. 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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      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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      Saving Conservatism From Trumpism

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      More from our inbox:The Candidates’ Foreign ExperienceA Loss of Diversity in Network NewsProtecting School LibrariesIndependent Voters Thalassa Raasch for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How to Save Conservatism From Itself,” by David French (column, Aug. 12):I commend Mr. French for declaring his intention to vote for Kamala Harris despite his pro-life convictions. And although I do not share his anti-abortion stance, I respect his beliefs.However, in my view Mr. French is mistaken to think that if Donald Trump is defeated in November, there is hope for a conservatism that demonstrates real compassion.Mr. Trump has not become the standard-bearer of the Republican Party against its will; on the contrary, he has articulated (in his most inarticulate way) the fanaticism of today’s conservative movement in America.Absolutism in regard to abortion, gun ownership, immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, the slashing of benefits for the impoverished — these are the bedrock beliefs of today’s conservative movement, with or without Donald Trump. Who are the compassionate, compromise-seeking Republican leaders waiting in the wings to command a majority of voters once Mr. Trump somehow exits the stage?Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of where the Republican Party finds itself today. Until honorable, conservative-minded people like Mr. French recognize this, it seems impossible to me that the Republican Party can rise from its ashes.Barth LandorChicagoTo the Editor:I don’t think one man’s vote will “save conservatism from itself,” but every vote counts, so I’m sure Kamala Harris will appreciate David French’s.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 Turn to Their National Security Go-To for Trump Assassination Inquiry

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      Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, whom Democrats tapped for impeachment, investigations and tough questioning of President Biden, is their top member of a task force investigating the shooting.Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and former Army Ranger, had just ordered his second martini at a bar in Bucharest, Romania, when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, called him with an urgent question: How quickly could he get to Ukraine?It was April 2022, weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine and touched off an international crisis, and two Republican lawmakers had rushed to be the first to travel to the besieged country. Now Ms. Pelosi wanted to quickly arrange her own visit — and she wanted Mr. Crow, whose national security background distinguished him in his party, to come with her.A late-night phone call from Ms. Pelosi to Mr. Crow would have been improbable when he first came to Congress in 2019. Hailing from a competitive district in Colorado, he had run as a centrist and avowed detractor of the liberal Ms. Pelosi, and after he knocked off a Republican incumbent he pledged that he would not vote for her for speaker.But since then, his credentials — including three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and a Bronze Star, as well as a law degree and a background in private-sector investigations — have made Mr. Crow a go-to lawmaker for Democratic leaders on difficult national security issues.Ms. Pelosi tapped him in 2019 to manage the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump. He was part of the whip operation to rally support for legislation to send tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. He was selected as the top Democrat on a subcommittee investigating the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.And last month, he was named the senior Democrat on a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.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 Campaign Says It Was Hacked by Iranians, but Details Are Murky

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      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