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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/2025.08.01-203303/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/2025.08.01-100428/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/2025.07.30-175106/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.