Politics

WASHINGTON —  John A. Boehner lasted five years as House speaker before he ran out of patience with his party’s hard-line Freedom Caucus.“Legislative terrorists,” the Ohio Republican called its members after he quit in 2015. “They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos.”Next came Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who lasted three years. “The House is broken,” he griped on his way out.Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) lasted all of nine months.“They are not conservatives,” he said of the Freedom Caucus after they led the drive to oust him as speaker last week. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic.”See a pattern?Ever since the tea party movement of 2010 elected a wav...

WASHINGTON —  Its hands largely tied, the Biden administration is weighing options for next steps in working with its longtime ally Israel, but aware that the traditional formulae for restoring calm in the volatile Middle East region no longer apply.Never has Israel suffered this number of casualties — 700 dead at latest count — in such a short period of time as in Saturday’s surprise cross-border attack on civilians and military targets from the Gaza Strip by Hamas militants. It is a unique moment when Israeli casualties exceed those among the Palestinians incurred in numerous fights throughout the decades. At least four U.S. citizens were among the dead, U.S. officials said.Like the United States, world leaders Sunday urged restraint. But Israel will not be able politically or psychologi...

AMMAN, Jordan —  With at least 700 people reported dead in Hamas terrorist and rocket attacks, and more than 400 Gazans reported killed in Israeli counterattacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday of a protracted conflict as Israel reacts to the bloodiest attack on its own soil in 50 years.Israel pressed its bombing campaign on Gaza on Sunday, firing a relentless barrage on the coastal strip and formally declaring war as Gaza’s Hamas rulers said their fighters continued to battle Israeli forces inside Israel.Israeli citizens were reeling from the unprecedented scale of the mayhem, in which militants slaughtered more than 200 youths at a musical festival and kidnapped elderly people and entire families. The violence shattered the relative comfort that many Israelis have enjo...

When Sharon Farber turned her phone back on after seeing a play with her daughter Saturday, frantic WhatsApp messages poured in from the other side of the world. Her sister in Israel told her that she and other relatives were hiding in bomb shelters because the country was under attack. Terrified and unable to work or sleep, Farber spent the day and night on the phone, calling and texting family and friends, and scrolling through the news. “Here, you’re so far away,” said Farber, a film composer and the music director for Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts. “There’s nothing you can do, except for lose your mind from worry.”Those feelings of fear and helplessness were echoed by many Sunday in Los Angeles’ Jewish community, which was reeling from the deadliest attack in Israel in decades durin...

JERUSALEM —  Israel battled Hamas infiltrators for a third day Monday, massing tens of thousands of troops near the Gaza Strip and making moves toward a full siege of the seaside territory, which Palestinian militants used as a springboard for the biggest attack in decades on Israeli soil. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete closure” of the Mediterranean enclave, telling army commanders in southern Israel that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza, which is home to about 2.3 million people.Israel has long controlled all formal points of access to the Gaza Strip, except for a tiny border with Egypt that is also blocked. Israel already cut off the territory’s power supply soon after Hamas’ surprise cross-border attack on Saturday by...

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus recently kicked off a new nationwide tour following a six-year hiatus. But for the first time in the show’s century-and-a-half history, there will be no elephants balancing on balls against their will, no bears forced to dance in costume and no lions and tigers corralled by tamers.That’s a good thing. This historic shift underscores our growing national embrace of the principle that animals shouldn’t suffer for our entertainment. Beyond Ringling, however, we still have some distance to go toward fully realizing this value.The circus wove itself into the fabric of American and European culture over the centuries with a captivating array of human performers, from clowns to acrobats, along with animals such as horses. But it wasn’t until the 19th ...

The Israeli government promised Monday to hunt down Hamas fighters and to punish the Gaza Strip after a surprise weekend attack killed more than 700 people in Israel, including at least 260 at a crowded music festival that became the scene of one of the country’s worst civilian massacres.A day after formally declaring war, Israel’s military was pursuing Hamas fighters who might remain in southern towns and intensified its bombardment of Gaza, where almost 500 people have died since Saturday’s unprecedented incursion.The militants blew through a fortified border fence and gunned down civilians and soldiers in Israeli communities along the Gaza frontier during a Jewish holiday. Israel struck back with airstrikes, including one that flattened a 14-story tower that held Hamas offices. ...

Former Israeli soccer player Lior Asulin was among the more than 260 people killed by Hamas militants at dawn Saturday in the final hours of Supernova, an all-night outdoor music festival held in Israel two miles from the Gaza border.Asulin, who celebrated his 43rd birthday Friday, played for Hapoel Tel Aviv and Bnei Sakhnin, among many other Israeli teams, during a 19-year career that ended in 2018. He served nearly a year in prison in 2021 after being convicted of selling marijuana and had worked on a horse farm since his release. “It is with great sadness that after many hours of disappearance, we learned that the club’s former player, Lior Asulin, was murdered by terrorists during a party,” Hapoel Tel-Aviv said on X, formerly known as Twitter.The Supernova rave event staged by Brazilia...

SDEROT, Israel — It began as a pleasant Saturday morning. Leeor Katz, a 37-year-old dental hygienist, was visiting her husband’s family in central Israel for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Then she started receiving texts from the Nir Oz kibbutz where she lived, just two miles from the Gaza Strip border: Fighters from the Palestinian militant group Hamas had entered the property and were burning down houses. “They were walking freely inside Israel, in a kibbutz inside Israeli borders,” Katz said. “We never thought it would happen.” The text chain, on a messaging group for kibbutz residents, said people inside safe rooms were struggling to breathe because of smoke from the fires. Katz did not realize that the attack was part of a sophisticated, multipronged assault by Hamas that saw i...

I don’t understand the stripe of Americans whose first response to Hamas’ recent attack on Israel is “yeah, but ….” Hundreds of attendees at a music festival murdered. Children and elderly people taken hostage. Civilians shot dead in the streets. When it comes to war there are no angels, but there are demons, and what Hamas did on Saturday represents the latter — full stop.However, I do understand the many Americans who see what Hamas did and think about the danger at our southern border — the Americans who are genuinely worried about the drug cartels’ growing influence in border towns and beyond. I do understand the part of America who saw Saturday’s horror and wondered how vulnerable we are to infiltration and attack, given the surge of asylum seekers and the U.S.’s inadequate systems fo...