Politics

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...

Defining a decade is a difficult task. Trying to summarize a span of time like the 2010s, built by financial crisis, capped by pandemic and split nearly down the middle, at least in the American imagination, by the ice pick of the Trump victory, seems like a task best set aside for at least a few more years.But in a new book, “If We Burn,” journalist Vincent Bevins takes a staggeringly ambitious shot at understanding the very recent past by planting chaos, upheaval and unintended consequences at the heart of the story. On the Shelf If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution By Vincent BevinsPublicAffairs: 352 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Bevins foun...

An unusual disc-shaped object from space landed last month on the barren sands of a U.S. military testing ground.Scorched from its fiery journey through the atmosphere, the capsule was lifted by helicopter and taken to a custom-built clean room at the Utah Test and Training Range, where it sat unopened under a continuous flow of nitrogen to avoid contamination by the germs of its new home planet.It was flown the next day to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, a hazmat-suited team carefully pried open the capsule to reveal the extraterrestrial treasure inside. Workers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston remove the lid of the OSIRIS-REx sample return canister inside a glovebox to prevent contamination. (Robert Markowitz / NASA-JSC) NASA will announce it...

After nearly two decades of statewide Republican candidates being rejected by California’s left-leaning electorate, former Dodger All-Star Steve Garvey hopes to drag the GOP back toward political relevance.Garvey announced Tuesday that he is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein, a gambit by a political newcomer banking on his baseball fame and affable demeanor to overcome the long odds Republicans face in this solidly Democratic state. At the very least, Garvey offers GOP voters a dash of celebrity excitement and his candidacy may raise the stakes for the top-shelf Democratic candidates.Though he hasn’t stepped on a baseball field as a player for more than three decades, Garvey may possess enough star appeal to consolidate California’s GOP vote and lure enough...

2023-10-10 09:00:46 Left to right: Rosalie Bablak, 86; David Reckless, 88; John Fuller, 81 at the Passavant Community Abundant Life Center in Zelienople, Pa. in September. Nate Smallwood for NPR hide caption toggle caption Nate Smallwood for NPR Left to right: Rosalie Bablak, 86; David Reckless, 88; John Fuller, 81 at the Passavant Community Abundant Life Center in Zelienople, Pa. in Sept...