Good morning.
New Hampshire will hold its primary today in what may be the last chance for Donald Trump’s opponents within the Republican ranks to stop him from running away with the party’s nomination.
Eight days after the former president’s record-setting victory in the Iowa caucuses, he is now locked in an increasingly bitter showdown with Nikki Haley, who has staked her candidacy on a strong showing in the more moderate New Hampshire. Ron DeSantis, the former Florida governor, exited the race on Sunday and added his name to the stack of Republican officials endorsing Trump.
Trump leads by double-digit margins but is considered somewhat more vulnerable in the New Hampshire, where independent voters make up nearly 40% of the electorate and can choose to vote in either party’s primary.
“We always buck the trend in New Hampshire,” the Republican governor Chris Sununu told voters as he escorted Haley across the state on the eve of the election.
How have the two candidates approached New Hampshire? Haley has been barnstorming from the “suburbs to the seacoast”, trying to persuade anti-Trump independents and open-minded conservatives to back her long-shot bid. Trump, by contrast, had been largely absent until this last week, holding raucous evening rallies between appearances in court.
When does voting begin? Voting has already begun, because Dixville Notch traditionally opens its polls at midnight and declares the result as quickly as possible afterwards. It is a tiny electorate – just six people voted. They all went for Haley.
Israel’s president says it has been an ‘unbearably difficult morning’ after deaths of 21 Israeli soldiers in one incident
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said it had been an “unbearably difficult morning” after hearing news of the deaths of 21 Israeli soldiers in one incident in Gaza.
He wrote on X: “An unbearably difficult morning, in which more and more names of the best of our sons – the silver tray in the full sense of the word – are added to the hero’s tombstone, in a war that has no justice.”
Israel’s military said on Tuesday that its troops had encircled the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Concern has been expressed about the safety of hospital staff and patients in Gaza, with the World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posting on X that “continuous fighting in the vicinity of al-Amal hospital and today’s raid at al-Kheir hospital in Gaza are deeply worrisome”.
Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged to push on with fighting in Gaza until “absolute victory” and said the military was investigating the incident in which 21 soldiers were killed when buildings exploded in central Gaza.
What else is happening? Calls for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and to accept a future Palestinian state as necessary for its own security are expected to dominate a meeting of the UN security council in New York today.
What do we know about the US-UK airstrikes on Houthi military sites in Yemen? The US carried out its eighth round of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Monday at 11.59pm local time. A Pentagon statement said the bombing was “proportionate and necessary”. US military officials said the strikes were successful and had “good impacts” in all eight locations. Here’s everything else we know.
‘We want everybody walking out’: UAW chief outlines mass strike for May 2028
Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, criticized Trump yesterday but declined to back Joe Biden as he reaffirmed plans to lead a general strike in the US in four years’ time.
Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.
“We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired Patco [an air traffic controller union] workers, everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out,” Fain said. “We missed the opportunity then but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out, just like they do in other countries.”
He reaffirmed ambitious plans to organize a general strike for 1 May 2028, coinciding with International Solidarity Day or May Day.
Are mass strikes common in the US? A general strike is a mass strike across various industries around similar demands or bargaining positions. In the US, they have been virtually nonexistent in recent decades given the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 that restricted secondary strikes and the decline of labor unions since the 1970s.
In other news …
A man suspected of shooting and killing eight people at three locations in the Chicago suburbs fatally shot himself after a confrontation with police in Texas, authorities have said. Police in the city of Joliet, Illinois, said 23-year-old Romeo Nance had been located by US marshals near Natalia, Texas, on Monday evening.
Flash floods inundated homes and overturned cars in San Diego on Monday as torrential rain swept through a large swath of the US. Flood waters swept away vehicles and caused cars to pile on top of each other in parts of the southern California city.
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck along the China-Kyrgyzstan border, and authorities warned of potentially widespread damage. The China Earthquake Networks Center said the quake hit Wushu county, in Aksu prefecture, shortly after 2am local time, the state-run Xinhua press agency reported.
The Biden administration is allowed to cut the razor wire deployed by Texas at the border with Mexico, the US supreme court ruled yesterday. The concertina wire, deployed at the direction of Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, runs roughly 30 miles (48km) along the Rio Grande river, near the border city of Eagle Pass.
Don’t miss this: ‘This should not be ridiculed’ – the link between hypochondria and early death
In an English churchyard, the Irish comedian Spike Milligan’s gravestone has a chastening message for those who knew him: “I told you I was ill.” We can all identify with Milligan’s concerns. Who hasn’t panic-researched supposed symptoms, fearing the worst? His joke speaks to our fear that legitimate health concerns will be shrugged off as nothing to worry about – “Oh, it’s just hypochondria.”
But there’s a difference between the occasional appointment with Dr Google and long-term, serious anxiety over health. This persistent fear of an undiagnosed illness may lead to endless doctor’s visits, or the opposite: total avoidance of medical care. What if we’re not taking hypochondria itself seriously enough? That’s the takeaway from a recent Swedish study that found that people with what is now called illness anxiety disorder may die earlier than others.
Climate check: Why 2024 will be a crucial year for climate litigation
Amid record domestic oil and gas production in the US and broken promises from fossil fuel companies, climate champions are increasingly looking to the courts to bring about accountability for climate damage. More than two dozen local and state governments are challenging oil companies on these grounds, while youth plaintiffs have seven pending lawsuits targeting state and federal lawmakers. Last year brought landmark victories for these complaints, including a groundbreaking ruling in Montana that could force the state to alter its environmental policies. Supporters hope that pattern continues.
Last Thing: Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny says prison plays pro-Putin pop song every morning
The jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has complained of being poisoned, assaulted and deprived of proper medical care, and this week he disclosed that he faced a new challenge: being forced to listen to a pro-Putin pop singer at 5am every day. Navalny, 47, said yesterday that his morning regime now consisted of listening to the Russian national anthem before being played I Am Russian, a patriotic song performed by a pro-Putin singer called Shaman.
Shaman, whose real name is Yaroslav Dronov, has ridden a wave of war-fuelled patriotism to become a staple on state TV and is one of the celebrities officially putting Putin forward to run again for the presidency in March.
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