🇺🇸 U.S. ELECTION
The presidential election is less than 60 days away. This is what we’re watching.
Trump avoids sentencing before Election Day
The judge who presided over Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan postponed Trump’s sentencing until after Election Day, guaranteeing that the American people will vote without knowing whether Trump, the first former president convicted as a felon, will spend time behind bars. The delay raised a question: Is he above the law?
Despite his legal troubles, Trump has enjoyed remarkably resilient support. A national poll of likely voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College found Trump narrowly leading Vice President Kamala Harris, 48 percent to 47 percent. The results are in line with polls in the pivotal battleground states, where Harris is tied with Trump or holds slim leads, according to New York Times polling averages.
Your questions:
We’re asking readers what they’d like to know about the election and taking those questions to our reporters. Today, we gave one to Edward Wong, who covers U.S. foreign policy and the State Department.
Europe is watching. How come the candidates don’t talk about the global view on America and the necessity to reconnect to allies? — Yasha Young, Berlin
Edward: The two candidates have very different views on America’s traditional security alliances. If Donald Trump were to be president again, he might not bolster America’s traditional alliances; he could very well weaken them instead. Vice President Kamala Harris has not talked much about foreign policy since becoming the Democratic candidate this summer. But most analysts think she will carry on President Biden’s efforts to strengthen traditional U.S. alliances.
Most American voters do not see foreign policy as a decisive issue or a priority in U.S. elections, unless American troops are directly involved in a disastrous war, so candidates generally do not spend much time talking about U.S. alliances or global affairs. However, we might see journalists ask both Harris and Trump questions about their foreign policy views in the televised debate on Tuesday.
Venezuela’s opposition candidate fled the country
Edmundo González, the opposition candidate widely considered the winner of Venezuela’s disputed presidential election last month, fled to Spain on Saturday after voluntarily seeking refuge at the Spanish Embassy in Caracas. He was facing an arrest warrant charging him with conspiracy, usurping power and sabotage, among other things.
The country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, has faced widespread condemnation for his claim that he won the July election and for the ensuing violent crackdown on demonstrators. Maduro’s security forces have rounded up anyone who appears to doubt his victory declaration, and many Venezuelans are fearful that his forces are crossing borders to go after enemies.
Violence surges in the West Bank
A 26-year-old American woman, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and three Israelis were killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank over the past weekend, adding to the rise of violence in the territory.
On Friday, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Turkey, was killed at a protest. In a separate incident, a Palestinian girl in the village of Qaryut, Bana Laboom, was watching violent clashes between Israeli settlers and troops from her window when she was shot, the village’s mayor said. Witnesses and Palestinian officials said Israeli soldiers had fired the shots that killed both.
Yesterday, a gunman killed three Israelis at a sensitive border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, according to the Israeli military.
In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman”: Even if she continues to live there, she can lose village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and other land rights. A growing number of women are now filing lawsuits and petitioning officials to confront this longstanding custom.
Chronicles of lives lived: Robert McFadden, one of the most distinguished bylines at The Times, retired yesterday at 82. Here’s a sampling of his artful obituaries.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Measuring the earth’s lungs, one tree at a time
Amid the vast emerald expanse of the Amazon, an infinitesimal patch in Colombia spanning less than a tenth of a square mile is a stand-in for the larger whole. Scientists are measuring pretty much every tree in it: 125,000 individual woody plants, from gigantic kapok trees to tightly coiled liana vines.
It is part of a multimillion-dollar effort in dozens of patches across the world aimed at figuring out, to an unprecedented degree of precision, the extent to which forests capture huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the main planet-warming greenhouse gas.
Our reporters spent days with the scientists conducting the Amazon tree census. Read the article here.
