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The family of Evyatar David, an Israeli held hostage in Gaza, saw him for the first time in months on Friday evening in a video circulated by his Hamas captors. He was emaciated and sallow in what appeared to be an underground tunnel.

Mr. David, 24, was abducted in one of the deadliest scenes of Oct. 7. at the Nova rave in southern Israel, where more than 350 people were killed. His family said in a statement that he had become a “living skeleton, buried alive” in Hamas tunnels.

Before the latest video, he was last seen in a video released by Hamas in March, in which militants filmed him watching from a distance while other Israeli hostages were freed during a two-month truce. Human rights experts say the videos — taken under extreme duress — could constitute a war crime.

“Our brothers are turning into skin and bones at this very moment,” Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan was one of about 250 people taken hostage during the Hamas assault, said at a rally on Saturday. His son is believed to still be alive.

“We tried everything — military pressure, displacing people, blocking food, conquering areas, eliminating Hamas commanders — none of that brought all of the hostages back,” Ms. Zangauker said. “The one thing we haven’t tried is a comprehensive agreement in exchange for ending the war.”

On Saturday, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with the families of Israeli hostages in Tel Aviv. He reiterated Mr. Trump’s commitment to bringing home the remaining captives and said, “those who are alive must be kept alive,” according to the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group.

Mass hunger has spread through Gaza as Israel limits the amount of humanitarian aid going in and desperation breeds chaos around most of what does get through. More than one in three of Gaza’s two million people are not eating for multiple consecutive days, according to the World Food Program.

Israel is pressing ahead with its military campaign in Gaza, where more than 60,000 people have been killed since the war began, including thousands of children, according to Palestinian health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

http://archive.today/2025.08.01-100428/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/01/world/middleeast/gaza-hunger-aid-sites-deaths-israel.html

Over the past several weeks, obtaining food in Gaza has been more than difficult — it has been deadly.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed while heading toward aid sites, many of them by Israeli forces. Many others have serious malnutrition, which Gazan health officials say has caused scores of deaths.

According to Israel’s own data, less food is going into Gaza now than during most other times in the war, when deliveries were generally far below what aid agencies said was necessary and people often went hungry.

How did it get so much worse?

In March, Israel imposed an aid blockade on Gaza in an effort to squeeze concessions from Hamas; it also said, without providing evidence, that the militant group was systematically stealing the supplies. That didn’t force the group to accept Israel’s terms, but it did cause widespread hunger among Gazans.

Amid growing international pressure, Israel established a new aid system in May in southern and central Gaza that would allow it greater control over aid deliveries.

The result has been deadly. More than 600 people have been killed while trying to reach the new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, according to the Gazan health ministry. The G.H.F. has disputed reports of shootings at or around its sites, although they acknowledge the areas beyond their perimeter is still an active war zone.

An Israeli military official who briefed reporters later conceded that Israeli forces had killed at least some people, including with artillery shells, as huge crowds tried to reach the sites.

The official said they were isolated episodes and argued that the overall death toll was exaggerated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to comply with military protocol.

Sometimes, the American security contractors at the sites have thrown tear gas grenades at people crowded into narrow, fenced-in lines with seemingly nowhere to go, footage shows. About 20 people were killed in a stampede at one of the sites in mid-July; the foundation claimed Hamas-linked instigators had started it.

After growing international fury over the humanitarian crisis, the Israeli military announced on Saturday that it would revive airdrops of aid into Gazas.

The airdrops have at times included roughly 10 tons of supplies per drop. A single truck crossing the Gaza border can carry double that far more cheaply.

http://archive.today/2025.08.01-203303/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/nyregion/gaza-war-protesters-schumer-gillibrand.html

Dozens of demonstrators protesting Israel’s war in Gaza were arrested Friday at the Midtown Manhattan offices of New York’s senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, days after they broke with many of their fellow Democrats by voting against a resolution to halt U.S. arms sales to Israel.

On Friday, more than 100 protesters, who were organized by the antiwar group Jewish Voice for Peace, chanted and banged pots and pans in the lobby of the Third Avenue building where both Mr. Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Ms. Gillibrand have office space.

The traditional bipartisan consensus in support of Israel among American lawmakers has collapsed over the course of Israel’s nearly two-year war in Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 people, according to Gazan officials.

Gaza has teetered on the brink of famine since the early months of the war, but the crisis has exploded since March, when Israel blocked the entry of humanitarian goods into the enclave in a bid to squeeze concessions from Hamas.

Israel later established a new aid distribution system that largely cut out humanitarian organizations and funneled aid through a private organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel and run by private American contractors.

That organization has been heavily criticized for failing to meet the needs of Gaza’s two million people, as well as for the deaths of hundreds of people, many of whom were shot by Israeli soldiers as they tried to access the aid. Israel has described some of those shootings as an effort at crowd control.

http://archive.today/2025.08.01-202608/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/us/politics/trump-nuclear-submarines-russia.html

President Trump said on his social media feed on Friday that he had “ordered two nuclear submarines” to be repositioned in response to online threats from Russia’s former president, Dmitri Medvedev, a rare threat of nuclear escalation between the superpowers.

Mr. Medvedev, who often serves as something of an online attack dog for the Kremlin, had said in a social media post of his own on Thursday that Mr. Trump should picture the apocalyptic television series “The Walking Dead” and referred to the Soviet Union’s system for launching a last-ditch, automatic nuclear strike.

But in Mr. Trump’s sudden and escalating confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, it is the first time he has referenced the American nuclear arsenal, much less threatened to reposition it. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he intends to impose new sanctions on Russia over its unwillingness to wind down its war in Ukraine, the latest step in his gradual shift toward a more antagonistic stance toward the Kremlin.

It was not clear what kind of nuclear submarines Mr. Trump was referencing. The U.S. has nuclear-powered attack submarines that search for targets, but it also has far larger, nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines. Those don’t need to be repositioned; they can reach targets thousands of miles away.

Mr. Trump said he had ordered the submarines “to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.” He added: “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

http://archive.today/2025.07.30-175106/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/opinion/trump-obama-treason-russia-miller.html

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals and engaged in a broad “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. That is patently false. In making those allegations, they seek to rewrite history. We want to set the record straight and, in doing so, sound a warning.

Let’s recap. The Trump administration’s claims focus on the intelligence community’s findings about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which were published in January 2017. The assessment found that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had ordered an influence campaign to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm the electability and potential presidency of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

The assessment also found that the Russians had developed a “clear preference” for Mr. Trump and aspired to help his election prospects. It further stated that the Russians employed a variety of tactics as part of this campaign, including hacking into the email accounts of Democratic Party organizations and officials and publicly releasing the stolen data through digital allies. Those covert activities were complemented by the overt but disguised efforts of Russian government intelligence agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries and paid social media users. As stated in the assessment, Mr. Putin himself ordered Russian intelligence to conduct the campaign.

Although the misrepresentations and disinformation of the administration are too numerous to address here, let us set the record straight on three. To be clear, we are writing here in our personal capacities, and our views don’t imply the endorsement of any federal agency.

First, the so-called Steele Dossier, a series of memos, now largely discredited, about purported Trump-Russia links written by a former British intelligence agent. Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Ratcliffe have claimed it played an integral role in formulating the assessment. We have testified under oath, and the reviews of the assessment have confirmed, that the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions. At the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s insistence, a short summary of the dossier was added as a separate annex only to the most highly classified version of the document that contained the assessment. That annex also explained why the dossier was not used in the assessment.

Second, the assessment made no judgment about the impact of Russian information operations on the outcome of the election. While some state and local electoral boards and voter information and registration systems were accessed by Russian intelligence, the assessment made clear that none of those types of systems were involved in counting votes. Russian influence operations might have shaped the views of Americans before they entered the voting booth, but we found no evidence that the Russians changed any actual votes.

Finally, and contrary to the Trump administration’s wild and baseless claims, there was no mention of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the assessment, nor any reference to the publicly acknowledged contacts that had taken place.

There is a remarkable irony about this whole affair. Despite claims by Trump administration officials of a nefarious political conspiracy, we did everything we could at the time to prevent leaks of intelligence reports, including Russia’s preference for Mr. Trump, a requirement that President Obama regularly emphasized. We knew such reports would be political dynamite. And despite substantial reporting on the matter, we succeeded in preventing such leaks before the election.

In keeping with this solemn obligation to avoid entanglement in American politics, the Obama administration released a written statement one month before the election warning about Russian interference. The statement deliberately said nothing about Mr. Putin’s preferred candidate, despite the evidence already accumulated by U.S. intelligence agencies about his preference.

The real politicization is the calculated distortion of intelligence by administration officials, notably Mr. Trump’s directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., positions that should be apolitical. We find it deeply regrettable that the administration continues to perpetuate the fictitious narrative that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. It should instead acknowledge that a foreign nation-state — a mortal enemy of the United States — routinely meddles in our national elections and will continue to do so unless we take appropriate bipartisan action to stop it.

http://archive.today/2025.07.28-184934/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/screwworm-beef-prices.html

The screwworm, like the measles, may have been forgotten by many, but it’s not new. And like the measles, which has cropped up in Texas recently, screwworm was once all but eradicated from the United States.

Infestations occur when a female fly lays eggs, between 10 and 400 at a time, on a fresh animal wound. Within a few hours, the eggs hatch into larvae that burrow and feed on the flesh. As the wound worsens, it attracts more flies, which lay more eggs. After about a week, adult screwworm flies can reproduce and begin the cycle all over again. The parasitic infection can kill a cow within two weeks if left untreated. There is currently no approved treatment.

Livestock, wildlife, pets and in rare cases, humans, can be affected.

In the 1950s, scientists discovered that radiation effectively sterilizes screwworm flies, and the federal government began an eradication program. A small outbreak in a deer population in the Florida Keys was snuffed out in 2017.

Now, a potentially bigger threat is approaching, migrating north from South America, where screwworm is endemic. It has been detected as close as 370 miles from Texas’ border, carried by the surge of animals coming through the Darién Gap, a once largely impenetrable jungle area that separates South and Central America. A joint eradication effort between the United States and Panama has largely kept screwworm south of Central America for decades. Illegal livestock transport and warm weather patterns have also contributed to the worm’s climb north, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department said.

The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, announced in June an $8.5 million initiative based in Texas that will produce sterile male screwworm flies and then drop them into affected areas. Female flies mate only once in their lifetime, so the sterile flies eventually overwhelm and eradicate the pest.

Ms. Rollins also committed $21 million to renovate a fly production facility in Mexico, where 60 million to 100 million sterile male flies would be produced each week for use in Mexico or Texas by the end of the year.

But that effort would yield only about 20 percent of the sterile flies the United States would need to manage an outbreak, experts said. Around 600 million flies were released each week to eradicate screwworm decades ago. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, introduced legislation that would provide $300 million to construct a facility to breed and sterilize flies, but the House has left Washington for the summer.

Cattle farmers are urging Texas lawmakers, who on Monday gaveled in a 30-day special legislative session, to share the cost of a fly factory in Texas, instead of waiting for the federal government.

In economic terms, the screwworm is already here, modestly at least. About three percent of U.S. cattle come from Mexico, but citing inadequate surveillance of screwworm, the Agriculture Department cut off imports of Mexican cattle in November. Federal officials resumed the trade in February after Mexico put in place more rigorous inspection protocols. But imports were shut off again in May after the pest was detected in Veracruz and Oaxaca.

Even before the fear of pestilence, the industry was facing challenges. Drought and high feed prices have pushed the American cattle inventory to the lowest it has been since 1952, according to the Agriculture Department. Domestic beef prices hit record highs in May, at an average of $5.98 per pound for ground beef, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Beef from Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, could bring some price relief, though President Trump has promised to impose a 50-percent tariff on Brazilian imports, beginning in August.

http://archive.today/2025.07.28-183146/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/trump-starvation-gaza-america-first.html

For Mr. Trump, who boasts about his transactional approach to deal-making on the world stage, the mass starvation unfolding in Gaza is a test of whether an America First foreign policy can confront one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century.

Global crises, especially those unfolding far from the United States, have often been tests of whether American presidents would show moral leadership on the world stage. Failures have been a source of painful regret. In a 1998 visit to Rwanda, President Bill Clinton said the United States and the rest of the world did not do enough to stop the genocide there. As he left office, President Barack Obama questioned why his administration did not do more to plan for the social chaos that engulfed Libya after its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, was killed.

Now, it is Mr. Trump’s turn to address the question of whether America still intends to take a leading role among nations in confronting the humanitarian effects of war. He will have to decide whether his preference for focusing on problems at home can justify ignoring horrific images of desperate children dying in Gaza hospitals.

To date, the president has appeared wary of using American power to ensure that food, medicine and fuel reach more than two million Palestinians living amid the rubble caused by nearly two years of Israeli bombardment. He has largely blamed Hamas for stealing food that has already been delivered.

Three weeks ago, when Mr. Trump met with Mr. Netanyahu at the White House, the president did not dwell on what humanitarian organizations were already signaling was an all-out food crisis in Gaza. Both men praised each other and blamed Hamas’s negotiators for refusing to agree to a cease-fire.

And as he traveled to Scotland on Friday, Mr. Trump deflected repeated questions about the hunger crisis in Gaza by insisting that food was being delivered by the United States and Israel, but was being blocked by Hamas.

Meeting on Sunday with Ms. von der Leyen, Mr. Trump declared that suffering in Gaza was “not a U.S. problem, it’s an international problem.” He then lamented that he had not been properly thanked for the tens of millions the United States had dedicated toward helping Gaza.

“Nobody said, ‘Gee, thank you very much,’” Mr. Trump complained on Sunday. “And it would be nice to have at least a thank you.”

But after a series of meetings with European leaders, including Mr. Starmer and Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, Mr. Trump began to echo the desperate language of other leaders: There is “real starvation” in Gaza, he said, and the United States would do more to help.

“That’s real starvation stuff, I see it, and you can’t fake that,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to get the kids fed.”

Mr. Trump emerged from the meeting criticizing as ineffective the current aid distribution effort his administration has backed. He said he wanted to create more food sites that were more easily accessible to Palestinians.

“We’re going to set up food centers and where people can walk in and no boundaries. We’re not going to have fences,” he said. “They see the food. It’s all there, but nobody’s at it because they have fences set up that nobody can even get it. It’s crazy what’s going on over there.”

http://archive.today/2025.07.26-130120/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un-aid-theft.html

For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

Israel used the rationale that Hamas steals aid when it cut off all food and other supplies to Gaza between March and May. In March, after a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza,” and he declared that Israel would prevent anything from entering the territory.

Now, the new aid system is managed instead by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F., a private American company led by a former C.I.A. agent. It was intended to eventually replace international aid organizations and the U.N. role.

The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired* on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

Israel has long had tense relations with the United Nations, which spilled over into open hostility during the Gaza war. Israel accuses the organization of bias and says that it was infiltrated by Hamas, including claims that U.N. staff took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that started the war.

This past week, Israel refused to renew the visa of Jonathan Whittall a senior U.N. humanitarian official who oversees humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the official had “spread lies about Israel.”

* Sic.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/world/middleeast/iran-europe-nuclear-talks.html

European diplomats met with Iran’s deputy foreign minister in Istanbul on Friday to try to restart negotiations on limiting or eliminating Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and pledged to keep talking.

Iran had halted fledgling talks with the United States after Israel launched a 12-day war last month that damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities and other infrastructure.

If Iran fails to take serious steps toward a new nuclear deal, the Europeans say that they will initiate a procedure to restore severe United Nations and multilateral sanctions on Iran that were suspended under a landmark 2015 deal because Iran has been violating its terms.

Without progress in negotiations to extend the deadline on restoring sanctions, any U.N. restrictions could vanish for decades thanks to the difficulty of achieving unanimity in a Security Council where Russia and China both hold vetoes, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

http://archive.today/2025.07.25-163507/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/us/politics/us-raid-syria-isis.html

U.S. military forces conducted a rare raid in northwestern Syria on Friday, killing a senior Islamic State leader and two other ISIS insurgents, the Pentagon’s Central Command said.

In a statement, Central Command said that U.S. forces killed the leader, Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, and his two adult sons in the Aleppo area.

Such ground operations are riskier than drone strikes because they put troops in harm’s way. They often mean that the target is particularly important and likely to be near civilians to try to ward off an air attack. And the location of the raid may contain sensitive information — like computer hard drives, cellphones and other data — that could help counterterrorism forces plan future raids.

“These ISIS individuals posed a threat to U.S. and coalition forces as well as the new Syrian government,” Central Command said in a statement, which noted that three women and three children who were at the location of the raid were unharmed.

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said in the statement that “U.S. Central Command is committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS terrorists that threaten the region, our allies and our homeland.”

http://archive.today/2025.07.25-025605/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/sports/hulk-hogan-dead.html

Hulk Hogan, whose flamboyance and star power helped transform professional wrestling from a low-budget regional attraction into a multibillion-dollar industry, died on Thursday in Clearwater, Fla. He was 71.

Police and fire department personnel in Clearwater were called to Hogan’s home on Clearwater Beach, where Hogan was treated for cardiac arrest, the police said in a “news alert” post on Facebook. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead, they said.

Hogan was born Terry Gene Bollea, on Aug. 11, 1953, in Augusta, Ga. His father, Peter, was a construction foreman; his mother, Ruth (Moody) Bollea, was a dance teacher. He attended the University of South Florida but dropped out, choosing the wrestling mat over the classroom.

He started wrestling in 1977. Like many in the sport, he was a big man, weighing 300 pounds in his prime. He was also exceptionally tall, 6-foot-8, helping to further a trend toward very big men in wrestling.

Hogan was the face of pro wrestling for decades, with his blond hair and horseshoe mustache, colorful bandannas and massive biceps, which he referred to as “24-inch pythons.”

Hogan had hit peak stardom, and crossed over into starring in movies. He played a wrestler in “No Holds Barred” (1989) and an ex-wrestler-turned-caregiver in “Mr. Nanny” (1993). He also starred as a mercenary in the television series “Thunder in Paradise.”

In 2005, he appeared in the reality series “Hogan Knows Best,” along with his wife at the time, Linda (Claridge) Hogan, and his children, Brooke (Hogan) Oleksy, a singer, and Nick Hogan, a racecar driver. They survive him, along with his third wife, Sky Daily, and two grandchildren.

Even after his wrestling days were over, he remained in the spotlight, most recently when he spoke last year at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, tearing off his shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance shirt underneath. He was earlier involved in a high-profile lawsuit in 2012, bankrolled by the billionaire Peter Thiel, against Gawker, the irreverent media company, after Gawker posted a video of Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife. He won the case on invasion of privacy grounds, reaping millions in damages.

In 2015, a tape of Hogan using racial slurs during the same encounter emerged. He apologized, but was dismissed from the W.W.E. He returned to W.W.E. shows in 2018.

How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here. Learn more about our process.

http://archive.today/2025.07.25-161109/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-aid-airdrops.html

Israel said on Friday that it would soon allow other countries to drop aid from the air into the Gaza Strip during a widening humanitarian crisis in which several children have died of malnutrition.

Jordan and the United Arab Emirates were expected to begin airdrops in the coming days, according to COGAT, the Israeli military agency that regulates humanitarian affairs in Gaza.

Nearly one in three people in the territory is coping with food insecurity, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program. The Gaza health authorities say that acute malnutrition is rising and that children have died.

Airdrops are extremely expensive and typically as a last resort, said Juliette Touma, the chief spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. Thousands of truckloads of aid, she said, were awaiting Israeli approval to enter Gaza.

Israeli officials say they have not limited the number of trucks entering the territory, and they say the U.N. has failed to distribute hundreds of truckloads’ worth of food and other provisions from border crossings deeper into the Gaza Strip.

At least one recent attempt by the U.N. to bring food into Gaza led to chaotic scenes as Israeli soldiers shot at crowds of Palestinians rushing to seize bags of flour. Gaza health officials reported that dozens of people were killed and wounded.

http://archive.today/2025.07.23-003348/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/opinion/no-israel-is-not-committing-genocide-in-gaza.html

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war?

The answer, of course, is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide, a legally specific and morally freighted term that is defined by the United Nations convention on genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

In response, Israel’s inveterate critics note the scale of destruction in Gaza. They also point to a handful of remarks by a few Israeli politicians dehumanizing Gazans and promising brutal retaliation. But furious comments in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities hardly amount to a Wannsee conference, and I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.

But bungled humanitarian schemes or trigger-happy soldiers or strikes that hit the wrong target or politicians reaching for vengeful sound bites do not come close to adding up to genocide. They are war in its usual tragic dimensions.

What is unusual about Gaza is the cynical and criminal way Hamas has chosen to wage war. In Ukraine, when Russia attacks with missiles, drones or artillery, civilians go underground while the Ukrainian military stays aboveground to fight. In Gaza, it’s the reverse: Hamas hides and feeds and preserves itself in its vast warren of tunnels rather than open them to civilians for protection.

These tactics, which are war crimes in themselves, make it difficult for Israel to achieve its war aims: the return of its hostages and the elimination of Hamas as a military and political force so that Israel may never again be threatened with another Oct. 7. Those twin aims were and remain entirely justifiable — and would bring the killing in Gaza to an end if Hamas simply handed over the hostages and surrendered. Those are demands one almost never hears from Israel’s supposedly evenhanded accusers.

Some readers may say that even if the war in Gaza isn’t genocide, it has gone on too long and needs to end. That’s a fair point of view, shared by a majority of Israelis. So why does the argument over the word “genocide” matter? Two reasons.

First, while some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge, it is also used by anti-Zionists and antisemites to equate modern Israel with Nazi Germany. The effect is to license a new wave of Jew hatred, stirring enmity not only for the Israeli government but also for any Jew who supports Israel as a genocide supporter. It’s a tactic Israel haters have pursued for years with inflated or bogus charges of Israeli massacres or war crimes that, on close inspection, weren’t. The genocide charge is more of the same but with deadlier effects.

Second, if genocide — a word that was coined only in the 1940s — is to retain its status as a uniquely horrific crime, then the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military situation we don’t like. Wars are awful enough. But the abuse of the term “genocide” runs the risk of ultimately blinding us to real ones when they unfold.

http://archive.today/2025.07.22-131649/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/world/europe/zelensky-ukraine-corruption.html

One of Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption advocates and a frequent critic of the Zelensky administration, Vitalii Shabunin, was accused in a court proceeding last week of evading military service and fraud. He has denied the accusation, which his many domestic and international defenders say lacks merit. If convicted, he could face a decade in prison.

Mr. Shabunin is accused of avoiding military duty while receiving $1,200 a month in army pay and illegally using a military vehicle. However, Mr. Shabunin volunteered for service on the first day of the Russian invasion in 2022 and was then seconded to work at the anti-corruption bureau.

The authorities do not dispute that his assignment was legitimate, but they say he did not perform his duties at the agency. Investigators said in a statement that the prosecution “is in no way related to his professional activities.”

Mr. Shabunin said that at the legal proceeding, the court refused to hear evidence from his boss at the time that showed the prosecutors’ claim to be false. The next step in his prosecution comes next month, when his case will go before a judge again.

On Monday, even as the country came under yet another large-scale bombardment in its grueling war with Russia, Ukrainian security agencies directed dozens of raids on Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor, saying that Russian intelligence had infiltrated the organizations.

In the raids on the two agencies, the Ukrainian authorities detained one employee working with the anti-corruption bureau, saying he was working against state interests. The bureau said in a statement that it had worked closely with Ukrainian security services about concerns related to the employee for years but had never been provided with any evidence against him.

Meanwhile, the bureau has been investigating possible abuses by people in the Zelensky administration, including Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, who was charged with corruption on June 23.

And on Tuesday, the Ukrainian Parliament, which Mr. Zelensky’s party controls, passed a law that — if signed by the president — would give Ukraine’s prosecutor general, who was appointed by Mr. Zelensky, new powers over investigations by the two agencies.

The two agencies were created more than a decade ago specifically to provide an independent check on government abuse, bypassing traditional law enforcement, which was seen as riddled with corruption. They were formed with the assistance of the F.B.I., supported by the European Union and nurtured by successive American administrations.

http://archive.today/2025.07.22-152153/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/nyregion/mingkwai-typewriter-china.html

http://archive.today/2025.07.21-010328/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/politics/epstein-employee-trump-investigation.html

Ms. Farmer, an artist, worked for Mr. Epstein in 1995 and 1996, initially to acquire art on his behalf but then later to oversee the comings and goings of girls, young women and celebrities at the front entrance of his Upper East Side townhouse.

Her account is among the clearest indications yet of how Mr. Trump might have come to be named in the unreleased investigative files in the Epstein case, a matter that has generated another political uproar in recent weeks.

In interviews over the past week about what she told the authorities, Ms. Farmer said she had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Epstein’s associates. But she said she was alarmed by what she saw as Mr. Epstein’s pattern of pursuing girls and young women while building friendships with prominent people, including Mr. Trump and President Bill Clinton.

Law enforcement agencies have not accused Mr. Trump of any wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein, and he has never been identified as a target of any associated investigation. Mr. Trump last week called for relevant grand jury testimony in the prosecution of Mr. Epstein to be publicly released, and has repeatedly dismissed any notion that he has something to hide. Even if that testimony is released, it is unlikely to shed much light on the relationship between the two men, which did not figure prominently in Mr. Epstein’s criminal cases.

http://archive.today/2025.07.20-134734/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/organ-transplants-donors-alive.html

A surgeon made an incision in her chest and sawed through her breastbone.

That’s when the doctors discovered her heart was beating. She appeared to be breathing. They were slicing into Ms. Hawkins while she was alive.

Across the United States, an intricate system of hospitals, doctors and nonprofit donation coordinators carries out tens of thousands of lifesaving transplants each year. At every step, it relies on carefully calibrated protocols to protect both donors and recipients.

But in recent years, as the system has pushed to increase transplants, a growing number of patients have endured premature or bungled attempts to retrieve their organs. Though Ms. Hawkins’s case is an extreme example of what can go wrong, a New York Times examination revealed a pattern of rushed decision-making that has prioritized the need for more organs over the safety of potential donors.

In New Mexico, a woman was subjected to days of preparation for donation, even after her family said that she seemed to be regaining consciousness, which she eventually did. In Florida, a man cried and bit on his breathing tube but was still withdrawn from life support. In West Virginia, doctors were appalled when coordinators asked a paralyzed man coming off sedatives in an operating room for consent to remove his organs.

Stories like these have emerged as the transplant system has increasingly turned to a type of organ removal called donation after circulatory death. It accounted for a third of all donations last year: about 20,000 organs, triple the number from five years earlier.

Most donated organs in the United States come from people who are brain-dead — an irreversible state — and are kept on machines only to maintain their organs. Circulatory death donation is different. These patients are on life support, often in a coma. Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.

They are alive, with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won’t recover. If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient’s heart to stop. This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable. After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.

The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.

Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors.

Bryany Duff, a surgical technician in Colorado, said one patient, a middle-aged woman, was crying and looking around. But doctors sedated her and removed her from a ventilator, according to Ms. Duff and a former colleague.

In Miami in 2023, a potential donor who had broken his neck began crying and biting on his breathing tube, which a procurement organization worker said he interpreted as him not wanting to die. But clinicians sedated the patient, withdrew life support, waited for death and removed the organs, according to the worker and a colleague he told at the time.

In West Virginia, doctors were taken aback after Benjamin Parsons, a 27-year-old man paralyzed in a car accident, was brought to an operating room and asked to consent to donating his organs as he was coming off sedatives.

Communicating through blinks, he indicated that he did not give permission. Still, coordinators initially wanted to move forward, according to text messages and interviews.

The federal government increased oversight after an explosive House committee hearing last September.

The hearing was about the general performance of the transplant system, but was upended by testimony about the Kentucky man, who awoke just as he was about to be removed from life support in 2021. The man, Anthony Thomas Hoover, is still alive. He has neurological injuries and cannot recount what he experienced.

Mr. Hoover’s story shocked many people, but it sounded familiar to Danella Gallegos.

In 2022, when she was 38 and homeless, Ms. Gallegos was hospitalized and went into a coma. Doctors at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque told her family she would never recover.

Her relatives agreed to donation, but as preparations began, they saw tears in her eyes. Their concerns were dismissed, according to interviews with the family and eight hospital workers. Donation coordinators said the tears were a reflex. (Tears can be an involuntary response to irritants.)

On the day of the planned donation, Ms. Gallegos was taken to a pre-surgery room, where her two sisters held her hands. A doctor arrived to withdraw life support. Then a sister announced she had seen Ms. Gallegos move. The doctor asked her to blink her eyes, and she complied. The room erupted in gasps.

Still, hospital workers said, the procurement organization wanted to move forward. A coordinator said it was just reflexes and suggested morphine to reduce movements. The hospital refused. Instead, workers brought her back to her room, and she made a full recovery.

http://archive.today/2025.07.20-141136/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-evacuation.html

Israeli forces killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip, after crowds gathered near a crossing from Israel to try to seize aid from United Nations trucks entering the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry and health workers.

The episode was the latest in a string of deadly shootings as hunger and desperation have gripped Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s nearly two-year campaign against Hamas.

The latest attack took place near the Zikim crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. More than 60 people were killed while seeking aid in northern Gaza on Sunday, according to the health ministry and Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

A field hospital operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in northern Gaza was flooded with gunshot victims from the episode near Zikim. The hospital received two of the dead and more than 100 wounded, said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent.

Israeli soldiers fired “warning shots” after thousands of Gazans gathered in the area, the Israeli military said in a statement. They had opened fire to “remove an immediate threat posed to them,” it added, but did not specify the nature of the threat.

At least 32 people were killed on Saturday after Israeli soldiers began shooting near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in southern Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry. The episode on Sunday did not occur near one of the foundation’s sites.

After the deadly shooting on Sunday, the Israeli military warned Palestinians to leave the populated areas of northern Gaza and parts of Gaza City that have been subject to previous evacuation orders, describing them as “combat zones.”

That followed an Israeli military order to Palestinians earlier in the day to evacuate parts of the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, one of the few areas in the territory where Israel has not conducted major ground operations during its military campaign against Hamas.

Many Palestinians had sought refuge around Deir al-Balah after being displaced several times from other parts of the enclave, because it has remained largely intact during the devastating 21-month Israeli campaign. The order to leave further shrinks the areas where the roughly two million residents of Gaza can live in relative safety and caused panic among Palestinians afraid that Israel was set to expand its ground invasion.

It was not clear if the evacuation notice portended an imminent expansion of Israel’s military incursion or was meant as a pressure tactic to wrest concessions from Hamas in the sluggish negotiations for a cease-fire.

More than 57,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed during the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war was ignited by a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others taken hostage.

http://archive.today/2025.07.18-171953/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/felix-baumgartner-dead.html

Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme adventurer who hurtled to earth from more than 24 miles high in 2012 and became the first human to break the sound barrier while free-falling, died on Thursday in a paragliding accident along the Adriatic coast in Italy. He was 56.

His death was confirmed by Red Bull, the energy drink company that sponsored him, as well as by the Italian authorities.

Mr. Baumgartner crashed to the ground a few yards from a swimming pool in the town of Porto Sant’Elpidio, the mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, said on Friday. He said that Mr. Baumgartner had become ill during his flight and had lost consciousness by the time of impact in a part of town popular among tourists. An autopsy was to be performed, he said.

Mayor Ciarpella called Mr. Baumgartner “a figure of global prominence, a symbol of courage and passion for extreme flight.”

How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here. Learn more about our process.

http://archive.today/2025.07.17-200544/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/us/politics/justice-department-brett-hankison-sentence-breonna-taylor.html

The chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights unit has asked a federal judge to sentence a Louisville police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to one day in jail, a stunning reversal of the unit’s longstanding efforts to address racial disparities in policing.

Last year, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted Brett Hankison, the officer, of one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force in discharging several shots through Ms. Taylor’s window during a drug raid that went awry.

Mr. Hankison, who is white, was the only officer to be charged for his actions during the botched operation that prompted of protests across the country. His shots did not kill Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who worked as an emergency room technician. Two other officers, also white, fired the fatal shots, but neither was charged.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, and a judge will consider the government’s request at a sentencing scheduled for next week.

On Wednesday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, to sentence Mr. Hankison to time he had already served, in addition to one day in prison and three years of supervised release.

In the filing, Ms. Dhillon suggested the prosecution was excessive, arguing that the Biden Justice Department had secured a conviction against Mr. Hankison after his acquittal on state charges and the ending of his first federal trial in a mistrial.

“In this case, two federal trials were ultimately necessary to obtain a unanimous verdict of guilt,” Ms. Dhillon wrote, adding that Mr. Hankison, now a felon who was fired from his job five years ago, had already paid a substantial penalty for his actions.

“The jury’s verdict will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again,” the filing added. Such requests are typically filed by career prosecutors who worked on the case. Wednesday’s filing was signed by Ms. Dhillon, a political appointee who is a veteran Republican Party activist with close ties to President Trump, and one of her deputies.

Shortly after Mr. Trump was sworn in for his second term, his political appointees at the Justice Department ordered an immediate halt to all new civil rights cases or investigations — and signaled that it might back out of Biden-era agreements with police departments that engaged in discrimination or violence, according to two internal memos sent to staff.

In May, Ms. Dhillon announced she was backing out of Biden-era agreements with Louisville and Minneapolis that were intended to enact policing reforms in the wake of the Taylor killing and murder of George Floyd, calling them “overbroad” and bureaucratic.

http://archive.today/2025.07.17-134137/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/arts/music/connie-francis-dead.html

Connie Francis, who dominated the pop charts in the late 1950s and early ’60s with sobbing ballads like “Who’s Sorry Now” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” as well as up-tempo soft-rock tunes like “Stupid Cupid,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and “Vacation,” died on Wednesday. She was 87.

Her publicist, Ron Roberts, announced her death in a post on Facebook. He did not say where she died or cite a cause.

http://archive.today/2025.07.16-230020/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/world/middleeast/israel-syria-damascus-strikes.html

Israel launched deadly airstrikes on Syria’s capital on Wednesday, damaging a compound housing the defense ministry and hitting an area near the presidential palace, according to the Israeli military and Syrian authorities.

An Israeli military official told reporters that Israel was conducting dozens of airstrikes against Syrian forces in Sweida — including targeting Syrian soldiers. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to comply with military protocol, said Israel was acting to prevent a buildup of hostile forces near its borders, as well as to prevent attacks on Druse civilians.

The Israeli military attacked the Syrian military’s general staff compound where it said Syrian commanders were directing government forces in Sweida. The defense ministry is housed in the same complex.

Israeli strikes also targeted an area near the presidential palace in Damascus, the president’s seat of power, the military said.

The Israeli airstrikes in the capital on Wednesday caused “extensive” damage in the heart of Damascus, according to the Observatory, sending thick plumes of smoke rising above the skyline. At least one civilian was killed and 18 were injured, according to Syria’s health ministry.

“We were inside the ministry when the first airstrike hit,” said Abu Musab, 30, an employee at the defense ministry. “Then a second strike followed. Later, the aircraft came back and carried out four strikes in a row,” he added.

“There are still people trapped under the rubble,” he said.

The bombardment in central Damascus, the capital, followed days of bloody clashes involving Syrian government forces in the southern region of Sweida, the heartland of the country’s Druse minority.

The Israeli government, which has pledged to protect that minority, warned Wednesday it would intensify strikes if Syrian government forces did not withdraw from the region, a strategically important province near Israel and Jordan. Israeli officials have said previously that they want to prevent any hostile forces in Syria from entrenching near their borders.

The escalating tensions between Israel and the Syrian government threaten to derail their tentative steps toward warmer ties after decades of hostility. Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara — a former Islamist rebel leader — has tried to stabilize the country since overthrowing the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December. He has also forged closer relations with the United States.

One of the biggest challenges for Mr. al-Shara’s new government has been controlling waves of sectarian violence that could easily spiral into a wider civil conflict again. These clashes were the third major surge of violence involving Syrian minorities since the Assad regime collapsed.

In March, armed groups who had served in Mr. al-Assad’s security forces ambushed the new government’s forces on the Syrian coast, setting of days of sectarian violence that killed more than 1,600 people, mostly from the minority Alawite sect, according to the Observatory.

In May, more than 39 people, mostly from the Druse minority, were killed over two days in a wave of violence near Damascus.

Shortly after the Israeli airstrikes on Damascus, Syrian authorities announced that a new cease-fire had been reached in Sweida with local leaders. Later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media that the United States had worked with all parties involved in the clashes and had “agreed on specific steps that will bring this troubling and horrifying situation to an end tonight.”

Soon after, the Syrian state news agency, SANA, reported that government forces had begun withdrawing from Sweida under the cease-fire agreement.

The latest flare-up of unrest in Syria underscored the deep challenges Damascus faces in trying to reassert authority across a country still fractured by a complex web of armed groups left over from the nearly 14-year civil war.

Donald Trump has privately encouraged Ukraine to step up deep strikes on Russian territory, even asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy whether he could strike Moscow if the US provided long-range weapons, according to people briefed on the discussions.

The conversation, which took place during the July 4 call between the US and Ukrainian leaders, marks a sharp departure from Trump’s previous stance on Russia’s war and his campaign promise to end US involvement in foreign conflicts.

Two people familiar with the conversation between Trump and Zelenskyy said the US president had asked his Ukrainian counterpart whether he could hit military targets deep inside Russia if he provided weapons capable of doing so.

“Volodymyr, can you hit Moscow? . . . Can you hit St Petersburg too?” Trump asked on the call, according to the people.

They said Zelenskyy replied: “Absolutely. We can if you give us the weapons.”

Trump signalled his backing for the idea, describing the strategy as intended to “make them [Russians] feel the pain” and force the Kremlin to the negotiating table, according to the two people briefed on the call.

The discussion between Trump and Zelenskyy led to a list of potential weapons for Kyiv being shared by the US side with the Ukrainian president in Rome last week, according to three people with knowledge of it.

During a meeting with US defence officials and intermediaries from Nato governments, Zelenskyy received a list of long-range strike systems that potentially could be made available to Ukraine via third-party transfers.

The arrangement would allow Trump to sidestep the need for Congressional approval on direct US military aid by authorising weapons sales to European allies, who would then pass the systems on to Kyiv.

Russia has repeatedly threatened to attack western targets in response to western supplies of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, but has yet to do so.

The Russian president said Moscow was entitled to “use our weaponry against military facilities of countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities, and in the case the aggressive action escalates, we will respond just as decisively and symmetrically”.

http://archive.today/2025.07.15-104024/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/world/europe/ukraine-weapons-us-nato.html

Patriot air defense systems, missiles and ammunition are among the American-made weapons NATO allies will buy under an arms deal brokered with President Trump to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian attacks, officials say.

Nearly all of the weapons are immediately available to ship to Ukraine, officials said, meaning they are either from existing military stockpiles or have just been built.

Neither Mr. Rutte nor Mr. Trump detailed what other kinds of missiles and ammunition might be sold to allies for Ukraine. It could include more of what Ukraine already got in the first three years of the war, such as 155-millimeter artillery shells that are crucial to holding back Russia on the front lines, officials said.

Some could be weapons that Ukraine has requested but never received from the United States, including deep strike Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs (pronounced “jazz ’ems”). They can reach into Russia and can be fired from F-16 fighter jets that European allies have sent Ukraine over the past year.

Generally, a single Patriot battery costs about $1 billion to build, depending on the model, and interceptor missiles cost about $3.7 million each. JASSMs sell for about $1.5 million each. And 155-millimeter artillery shells can cost thousands of dollars per round.

Ukraine has about eight Patriot systems, although as recently as May, two were being refurbished and not functioning, U.S. officials have said. Most are positioned around the capital, Kyiv, which has left other cities vulnerable to Russian attacks.

Ukraine has other air defense systems, but only the Patriot has intercepted Russian ballistic missiles that can hit targets from many hundreds of miles away in minutes.

More Ukrainians were killed in June than in any other single month so far in the three-year war, the United Nations reported. Russian forces continue to advance in eastern Ukraine.