Monday Briefing – The New York Times
🇺🇸 U.S. ELECTION 2024
The presidential election is less than 90 days away. This is what we’re watching.
The Harris-Walz ticket’s first week
As a remade contest takes shape, the traditional August political doldrums have given way to a flurry of rallies, interviews and public appearances. The summer blitz comes just a week before the Democratic National Convention is set to begin in Chicago, where the newly minted ticket will try to maintain the momentum created by a weeklong introduction to the nation.
Both presidential tickets went west over the weekend, with Donald Trump holding a rally in Montana and fund-raisers in Wyoming and Colorado, while Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, held events in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada before heading to a fund-raiser in San Francisco.
Since the first rally for Harris and Walz at the beginning of last week, Democrats have found themselves in a surprising place: on offense. Harris now leads Trump in a national polling average and in a few must-win battleground states, a Times/Siena College poll found. Here are five takeaways from the first week of the Harris-Walz campaign.
Closing out the Paris Olympics
After more than two weeks of spirited competition, the 2024 Summer Olympics drew to a close last night with a grand and theatrical ceremony at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis that featured hundreds of performers and live music from international pop stars. It offered one last moment for Paris to bask in the joy of the Games.
The Olympic flag was then ceremoniously passed to the city hosting the next Summer Games, Los Angeles, via the actor Tom Cruise, who, attached to a cable, soared from the roof and landed among the athletes on the stadium floor. He took the Olympic flag from Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the American gymnast Simone Biles and rode away on a motorcycle.
The next Winter Games will be held in Italy, in Milan and Cortina, in February 2026.
What else to know:
Israel expanded evacuation orders in southern Gaza
The Israeli military yesterday ordered civilians to evacuate from part of a humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, a city in the southwestern Gaza Strip, saying it was planning to fight in the area because Hamas had “embedded terrorist infrastructure” there. Here’s the latest.
Israel’s military said it was redrawing the border of the humanitarian zone and urged civilians to move to what it said were safe zones. But many people in Gaza say there is nowhere in the enclave that is truly safe.
A day earlier, an Israeli strike on a school turned shelter killed more than 90 people, the local authorities said. More than 2,000 displaced people had been staying at the shelter, which the Israeli military said was being used by Hamas and another armed Palestinian group for military operations and attacks on Israel. Kamala Harris, the U.S. vice president, condemned the civilian deaths, telling reporters that “far too many civilians” had been killed in the enclave.
On the ground: Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, an American pediatrician who spent three weeks working in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals, shared a record of what he witnessed, including rare footage from inside Al Aqsa Hospital.
MORE TOP NEWS
A researcher at the University of Edinburgh believes he has found the earliest calendar of its kind at Gobekli Tepe, a site in southern Turkey that used to be an ancient complex of temple-like enclosures.
The essential Shel Silverstein
Shel Silverstein — by turns a Playboy magazine cartoonist; the singer-composer who wrote “A Boy Named Sue”; and a children’s book author — was irreverent, absurdist and ahead of his time. The New York Times Book Review compiled a best-of-the-best list by the groovy pied piper who made poetry fun. Here are three standouts. (Read the full list.)
The collection “Where the Sidewalk Ends” is “either the ultimate in silliness or the ultimate in good sense,” our reviewer writes. “Quite possibly the latter.”
“Falling Up” has a reasonable claim at having the best pictures of any Silverstein work. The poems are also nothing to sneeze at, but this is the collection to grab if you just want to linger over effortlessly expressive art.
And for a surprise, try “Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros,” which stands out from the rest of the pack. The aesthetics are a little different — a pop of color on its cover and shaky lines inside — and the story has a sweetness you won’t find elsewhere in Silverstein’s work.
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