“To those people who are saying, ‘Well, I can’t support Harris because she disagrees [with] Trump on that issue’ … he will be closer to Netanyahu,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Sanders said he thinks Vice President Harris can be moved “on that issue” of the Israel-Hamas war.

Harris has called for a cease-fire deal and pushed for the war in Gaza to end, but she faces scrutiny from both sides — from people who want to see Hamas defeated and those who call for the end of the war in Gaza.

“So, if we are able to elect Harris, I think we’re going to have an opportunity to move her on that issue, to make it clear, we cannot allow children in Gaza to starve to death,” Sanders said. “She will be open to that. I doubt that Trump will.”

Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu in one call this month, “Do what you have to do,” according to six people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and confidential information. Trump has said publicly that the two have spoken at least twice in October, with one call as recently as Oct. 19.

“He didn’t tell him what to do militarily, but he expressed that he was impressed by the pagers,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who was on a call this month with Trump and Netanyahu, referring to the Israeli operation that killed Hezbollah leaders with explosive batteries inside pagers. “He expressed his awe for their military operations and what they have done.”

Graham added: “He told them, do what you have to do to defend yourself, but we’re openly talking about a new Mideast. Trump understands that very much there has to be change with the corrupt Palestinian state.”

But the lack of a good story is hurting Israel in other ways. Israelis are being asked to send their sons and daughters to fight every day against Hamas and Hezbollah foes — yet cannot be sure if they are going to war to save the state of Israel or the political career of their prime minister.

Because there is more than enough reason to believe that Bibi wants to keep this war going to have an excuse to postpone testifying in December at his corruption trial, to postpone an independent commission of inquiry as to how his government failed to prevent the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, as well as to forestall new Israeli elections and maybe even to tilt our presidential election to Donald Trump. Netanyahu’s far-right Jewish supremacist partners have told him they will topple his government if he agrees to stop the war in Gaza before an undefined “total victory” over Hamas and if he tries to bring the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo peace process, to help govern Gaza in the place of Hamas — something that Hamas greatly fears.

This absence of a story is also hurting Israel strategically. The more Israel has a legitimate Palestinian partner, like a reformed Palestinian Authority, the better chance it can get out of Gaza and not preside over a permanent insurgency there, the more allies will want to help create an international force to fill any vacuum in Southern Lebanon and the more any Israeli military strike against Iran would be understood as making Israel safe to try to make peace with the Palestinians — not safe for an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which is what some of Netanyahu’s far-right partners are seeking.

I cannot guarantee that there is a legitimate Palestinian partner for a secure peace with Israel. But I can guarantee that this Israeli government has done everything it could to prevent one from emerging — by strengthening Hamas in Gaza at the expense of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”

His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.

But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.

Over the past 15 years, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides; blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate-resilience grants.

Those decisions reflect the influence of North Carolina’s home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.

“The home builders association has fought every bill that has come before the General Assembly to try to improve life safety,” said Ms. Wooten, who works for Facilities Strategies Group, a company that specializes in building engineering. She said that state lawmakers, many of whom are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry, “vote for bills that line their pocketbooks and make home building cheaper.”

The Federal Reserve is ready to cut interest rates, confident that inflation is easing to normal levels and wary of any more slowing in the job market.

“The time has come for policy to adjust,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said Friday, in his most anticipated speech of the year. “The direction of travel is clear.”

Powell did not specify a timeline, or forecast how much Fed leaders were preparing to lower rates. But his remarks came as close as possible to teeing up a cut at the Fed’s next policy meeting in mid-September. Rates currently sit between 5.25 and 5.5 percent, where they have remained since July 2023. The open question now is whether officials will opt for a more aggressive cut next month — a half-point instead of a more typical quarter-point.

On the final, and most anticipated, night of the four-day Chicago convention, Harris, 59, promised to chart a "New Way Forward" as she and Trump, 78, enter the final 11 weeks of the razor-close campaign.

After days of protests from Palestinian supporters who were disappointed at not getting a speaking spot at the convention, Harris delivered a pledge to secure Israel, bring the hostages home from Gaza and end the war in the Palestinian enclave.

"Now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done," she said to cheers. "And let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself."

"What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking," she said.

They said tens of thousands of protesters would be here. They claimed they would “shut down the DNC for Gaza.” Like the Chicago riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, their demonstrations would snarl the city, shake the party and doom the candidacy of “Genocide Joe.”

Then came Kamala Harris — and the protest fizzled.

Organizers anticipated there would be 30,000 to 40,000 protesters on hand for Monday’s kickoff. But only a few thousand showed up; police estimated 3,500

In December 2022, early into what he now describes as his political journey, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a speech warning his fellow Democrats that they were ignoring a crisis staring them in the face.

The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.” This may sound like strange talk from a middle-of-the-road Democratic senator, who up until that point had never seemed to believe that the system that orders our world was on the verge of falling. He campaigned for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries, and his most visible political stance up until then was his work on gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Thoughtful but prone to speaking in talking points, he still comes off more like a polished Connecticut dad than a champion of the disaffected. But Mr. Murphy was then in the full flush of discovering a new way of understanding the state of the nation, and it had set him on a journey that even he has struggled sometimes to describe: to understand how the version of liberalism we’d adopted — defined by its emphasis on free markets, globalization and consumer choice — had begun to feel to many like a dead end and to come up with a new vision for the Democratic Party.

...

Mr. Murphy is a team player and has publicly been fully supportive of Ms. Harris, but he also wants Democrats to squarely acknowledge the crisis he believes the country is facing and to offer a vision to unmake the “massive concentration of corporate power” that he thinks is the source of these feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Only by offering a “firm break” with the past, he believes, can Democrats compete with Republicans like JD Vance, who, with outlines like Project 2025, have a plan to remake American statecraft in their image and who are campaigning on a decisive break with the status quo.

Academics, think tanks and magazines are buzzing with conversations about how to undo the damage wrought by half a century of misguided economic policies. On the right, that debate has already spilled out into the public view. But on the center-left, at least, very few politicians seem to be aware of this conversation — or at least willing to talk about it in front of voters.

Since 2008, Congress, with bipartisan support, has spent billions on rental aid for unhoused veterans and cut their numbers by more than half, as overall homelessness has grown. Celebrated by experts and managed by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the achievement has gained oddly little public notice in a country in need of broader solutions.

Progress in the veterans program has slowed as rising rents displace more tenants and make it harder to help them regain housing. But while homelessness among veterans rose last year, the increase was smaller than other groups faced. Admirers say the program’s superior performance, even in a punishing rental market, offers a blueprint for helping others and an answer to the pessimism in the debate over reducing homelessness.

As concerns about returning service members grew during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress in 2008 revived a pilot program, called HUD-VASH, that pairs vouchers from the housing department with case management from the veterans department. Voucher holders pay 30 percent of their income for rent, while the federal government covers the rest up to a local ceiling.

After expanding the program every year, Congress has created about 110,000 vouchers, meaning veterans have much shorter waits for rental aid than other homeless groups. The vouchers cost more than $900 million a year.

“The fundamental reason why homelessness among veterans has fallen so much is that Congress has provided resources,” Mr. Kuhn said.

Notably, the rental aid comes with no conditions: Services like drug treatment or mental health care are offered but not required. That approach, called Housing First, once enjoyed bipartisan support but has recently drawn conservative critics who say it promotes self-destructive behavior.

After last week’s debate disaster, some Democrats are trying to circle the wagons to protect President Biden, noting that Barack Obama lost his first debate as an incumbent president, too.

But this one doesn’t pass the smell test. Mr. Obama wasn’t 81 years old at the time of his debate debacle. And he came into the debate as a strong favorite in the election, whereas Mr. Biden was behind (with just a 35 percent chance of winning).

A 35 percent chance is not nothing. But Mr. Biden needed to shake up the race, not just preserve the status quo. Instead, he’s dug himself a deeper hole.

Looking at polls beyond the straight horse-race numbers between Mr. Biden and Donald Trump — ones that include Democratic Senate candidate races in close swing-state races — suggests something even more troubling about Mr. Biden’s chances, but also offers a glimpse of hope for Democrats.