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Three Winners Announced in Harvard Global Essay Contest

Earlier this year, Walker’s juniors participated in the Harvard Alumni for Global Women’s Empowerment annual essay contest which invites students to think critically about the status and rights of women. Students were asked to answer the question, “What is the biggest challenge facing women and girls in your country today?”

Walker’s junior Elliott Glynn was named winner, with honorable mentions going to Valeriia Lukianova ’22 and Allison Wall ’22. The head of the jury says, “This year was one where all the girls had inspiring and passionate things to say about present events and their observations about the current state of women where they live. It has truly been a unique year and I hope the girls continue to speak out and to work to make things better for everyone. Congratulations to all three for this remarkable achievement!”

This is the fourth year that Walker’s has been invited to participate in the annual contest. A published anthology of winning essays from young women all over the world, including Walker’s students, is forthcoming.

Learn more at  www.globalwe-essays.org .

Previous Award Winners

2020: Jenessa Lu ’21 and Madi Knapp ’21 2019: Hazel Wang ’19 (Honorable Mentions: Sabrina Li ’19, Clare Tomlinson ’20 and Riley Sheldon ’20) 2018: Isabel Lardner ’18 and Marion Carr ’18 (Honorable Mentions: Theresa Jo ’18 and Kate Zhang ’18)

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Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Rochester

2023 Essay Contest

First prize:    $250         Second Prize:    $100         Third Prize:    $50 Topic: Yes, We Can IMPORTANT! Please note: the deadline for essay submissions is MARCH 15, 2023.

President Barack Obama used the phrase “Yes, we can” to encourage his supporters during the 2008 presidential election campaign. How would you apply his slogan to today’s world. What gives you hope for positive developments in the world and makes you optimistic about the future? You may address the topic in terms of what people can do to bring about positive change in any area of contemporary life, including your school or community, the country as a whole, and/or the larger world we live in.  You may discuss how people can work together, as well as how a single person or a few people can have a positive impact on society. You do not need to address all those suggestions and you may write from a different approach to the question. Remember that your treatment of the topic should be in the form of an essay, not a letter or a poem.  The Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Rochester invites all area students in grades 9 -12 to demonstrate their writing skill and creative ideas in this essay contest. You can take any position, argue any point, and espouse any cause in relation to this theme…so long as the work is your own and no one else’s.  We are looking for students with fresh perspectives, well-reasoned arguments, and excellent verbal skills.  

Official Rules

1.Any student currently attending school in the Greater Rochester Area in Grades 9,10, 11 or 12 may enter by completing the entry form and submitting a qualifying essay.  Children of members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Rochester (“HRCR”) are not eligible to enter.  No purchase, entry fee or other payment is required.  Information provided on the entry form will be used solely for purposes of this Contest.

2.    Entries must be sent by electronic mail unless permission is given to submit paper entries. Submit electronic essays to  [email protected]  An entry form is also required and is available from the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Rochester website: http://hrcrochester.clubs.harvard.edu You should keep a copy of your essay for reference. We cannot assume responsibility for delayed, misdirected or lost email. 3.    Entries shall be no more than 1,000 words long. ESSAYS MUST CONSIST SOLELY OF THE ENTRANT’S ORIGINAL WORK AND MUST NOT BE ENTERED IN ANY OTHER CONTEST.  Though an essay may contain ideas or facts derived from research, the expression of these must be exclusively in the entrant’s own words.  No editing, correction or other assistance by anyone else, nor borrowing of another’s language without attribution, is permitted.  Any entrant who is discovered to have received such assistance in preparing an entry will be disqualified.  (If discovery occurs after a prize has been awarded, the prize will be forfeited and repaid to HRCR.) The theme of the essay shall be: Yes, we can!  Potential winners shall be selected according to the following criteria: (a) originality of ideas, (b) persuasiveness of arguments, (c) relevance to the theme, (d) effectiveness of expression, (e) and appropriate length.  The panel of judges shall consist of members of HRCR and other qualified persons selected by HRCR, whose decisions in all matters shall be final and binding on all parties.

The Prizes are:    

one First Prize of $250 one Second Prize of $100 one Third Prize of $50 

HRCR reserves the right to withhold awarding any or all of the prizes if the      judges decide the entries are of insufficient merit. All entries become the property of HRCR and may be retained or disposed of in its sole discretion, but copyright in each entry will remain with the entrant.  Any taxes on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners or their guardians.

Sponsor:    Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Rochester, Inc.

Jane Shuffelton, Contest Administrator                              

[email protected]

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2024 Harvard Alumni for Global Women's Empowerment Essay Contest

The Harvard Alumni for Global Women's Empowerment Essay Contest is organised by the Harvard Alumni Association for JC1 students to participate in. Students are required to write a 750-word essay on the question, What is the biggest challenge facing women and girls in your country today?

Out of 19 participants from SAJC, we are pleased to share that 5 of them have clinched an award each.

🔷 Cordelia Chong from 24A02, who is 1 of the 8 winners from Singapore.

Honourable Mention

🔷 Capuyan Celestine Isleonor Bautista from 24A01;

🔷 Aria Ng from 24A02;

🔷 Mah Jia Min from 24A06 and

🔷 Chloe Ki from 24S22.

We would also like to acknowledge the efforts of the other participants. They are:

1. Andrea Seah from 24A01

2. Charmaine Toh from 24A01

3. Reina Lim from 24A01

4. Sara Tan from 24A01

5. Gwen Loh from 24A05

6. Rachel Lim from 24A06

7. Stella Tan from 24A06

8. Tanika Kumaya from 24S06

9. Dang Bao Chau Anh from 24S11

10. Goh Yin Xuen from 24S11

11. Venus Chan from 24S13

12. Teo Amanda from 24S15

13. Kayden Lim from 24S21

14. Song Pei Ling from 24S22

Well done Saints!

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Xaverian Wins Harvard Alumni for Global Women's Empowerment Essay Contest

XSN Alumna Janine Mikyla U. Hung (‘23) was among this year’s awardees in the Harvard Alumni for Global Women’s Empowerment Essay Contest (Harvard GlobalWE). 

The Harvard GlobalWE, launched in 2015, is an annual event for Grade 11 students which aims to promote the status and rights of women across the world. Her winning piece is expected to be published in the Harvard GlobalWE’s website ( https://www.globalwe-essays.org/ ). 

Janine joins Elica Luna Saenz (XSN ‘22) and Rose Guada Marie Manalo (XSN ‘21) in the list of Xaverian awardees in this competition.

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University People | Alumni

History in Progress

How the War on Terror reshaped American life

September-October 2024

Richard Beck | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF RICHARD BECK

September 11, 2001, split Richard Beck’s adolescence in two. Fourteen on the day of the attacks, he was old enough to remember life before—when anyone could walk up to an airport gate, when students learned in school that history was over. He came of age in their aftermath, as the United States became entangled in wars in the Middle East, and militarism shaped other aspects of American life—airport security, popular movies—more subtly. Witnessing the country’s transformation, Beck ’09 writes in his new book Homeland: American Life in the War on Terror, he realized that “history is something you have to try to understand even as you live through it.”

That attempt to understand didn’t begin right away. Beck grew up in a Philadelphia suburb as a “mainstream liberal Democrat,” and during high school, was more concerned with music than politics. He sang and practiced instruments, thinking he might try to go to conservatory for classical piano. When he realized he “wasn’t good enough,” he turned to writing about music and other cultural works. At Harvard, he reviewed music and theater for the Crimson. His junior year, he wrote an essay for the Advocate about a favorite band from high school, Neutral Milk Hotel, “and the process of leaving behind the first music you fall in love with,” he says. That piece made him sure that he wanted to be a writer.

Beck was content to focus his writing largely on culture—until some editors from a small, newish magazine called n+1 visited the Crimson . N+1 had been launched in 2004 by six young writers and editors, four of them Harvard alumni ( “Intellectual Entrepreneurs,” January-February 2010). The existing media landscape, they felt, was at once hopelessly fractured—literary magazines didn’t engage with politics; political outlets didn’t engage with culture—and disturbingly unified: many publications, including left-leaning ones, mounted no real criticism of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. N+1 sought to examine culture, politics, and how they interacted—while challenging all political orthodoxies.

After the event at the Crimson, Beck took some n+1 issues home to read. “Knowing that you could move to New York and write like that—that was a big, like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” he says. “Up until then, I’d had the standard ambition of, ‘Maybe I can be a New Yorker writer.’ And then I got to New York and I realized that’s not actually an ambition of mine. That’s not how I want to write.”

After graduation, Beck moved to New York, where he still lives, and began contributing to n+1. He joined the masthead as an assistant editor in 2012, before becoming a senior writer—his current role—a few years after that. (“I was really bad at [editing],” he says. “After a few years, I said, ‘Can we please be real? Just make me a writer on the masthead. That’s what I actually do.’”)

In 2011, Beck participated in a research project organized by n+1 on the history of second-wave radical feminism. Through this research, he learned about the child-abuse panics of the 1980s, when teachers, aides, and day care workers across the nation were falsely accused of horrifying abuse. His first book— We Believe the Children, published in 2015—blends history and psychology, arguing that the panics were a backlash against feminist progress of the 1970s: the genesis of today’s culture wars.

Most of the events covered in that book took place before Beck was born. As he was writing it, however, he was also thinking about contemporary politics. Beck graduated during President Barack Obama’s first year in office, when many were still optimistic that he would end the War on Terror, as he had promised. “Watching [Obama] not dismantle this war that I’d been told was purely a right-wing, neoconservative, Republican project,” Beck says, “is when I started trying to figure out: ‘What is this political miseducation I got? How am I supposed to understand what this war is for?’”

He started to answer those questions by thinking about culture. In 2012, he wrote an n+1 review of the popular TV series Homeland. The show follows CIA officer Carrie Mathison as she attempts to expose former U.S. Marine-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody. On its face, Homeland was a repudiation of the backwards, brutish tactics of the Bush-era War on Terror: characters reject torture and Islamophobia; the terrorist Mathison pursues is white, not Arab. In his review, Beck argued that these features were simply cosmetic updates that allowed liberals to repackage the same ideas that drove the war under George W. Bush.

In his new book, Beck expands his thinking about culture and politics. Analyzing Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, he explains why cultural works—even those that seem far afield from politics—merit political examination. Nolan isn’t seeking to express a coherent political vision. Instead, “He is like a weather station, picking up on things in the atmosphere—stories in the news, images that stick in people’s minds…and then using hundreds of millions of dollars to put them into movies.” That reflection of Americans’ psyches is political. Batman is a vigilante who must break the law to preserve order in Gotham: a soothing narrative, Beck argues, for citizens of a country that had invaded Iraq in a move condemned by much of the world.

Once Beck identified the superficial differences that obscured fundamental similarities between the Bush and Obama administrations’ foreign policies, the next step was to understand what motivated both presidents to pursue the war. To answer that question, Beck turned to economics. In the broadest, most ambitious section of the book, he analyzes the financial rationale behind the War on Terror. “Something about America’s superpower status had changed by the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he writes: the slowing growth rate starting in the 1970s.

Before, the U.S.-led world order, while not beneficial for all, at least guaranteed economic stability for many countries. But as economic growth slowed, Beck argues, America could no longer claim its supremacy benefited much of the world, and the globe’s “surplus population”—the technical term for people who are not formally employed—grew. To maintain its dominance, even as the economic foundations of that dominance eroded, the United States turned to a “militarized relationship with the rest of the world,” Beck says—and to suppress the political discontent that slowing growth fostered, global leaders became increasingly authoritarian. In his view, this narrowing of economic opportunity drove terrorism: “Just because it is neither politically constructive nor morally justifiable does not render terrorism incomprehensible,” he writes. “It is a demand that all of this be made to stop.”

For Beck, perhaps the most insidious effect of the War on Terror, its longest tail, is how it degraded the notion of American citizenship. Citizenship, he argues, comprises not just the ability to vote, but also the rights to engage in political discourse, to assemble, and to demonstrate. All became increasingly difficult after 9/11, when a “conformist cultural climate” took hold of the media. Perhaps that conformity was inevitable in the immediate wake of the attacks—but it didn’t let up in the years after, as when the mainstream media failed to scrutinize the government’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Instances like this, Beck argues, show how citizenship became hollowed out, as Americans lost the ability to debate and influence government policy.

That inability to sway political outcomes continues to shape foreign policy today, Beck maintains. “The most important political story of the last few decades isn’t this narrative that gets rehashed about increasing polarization,” he says. “Instead, it’s a continued unity between the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to foreign policy.” Though they may disagree on details, both parties have fundamentally similar positions on China and Israel-Palestine, he says. And while Republican skepticism of continued support for Ukraine may seem to challenge that unity, Beck argues that this position is a superficial one. Republicans, he writes, “would be more or less content to see Russia come out of the war with some extra territory, but that position is not the product of any principled antimilitarism”—an antimilitarism that would balance funding Ukraine’s self-defense with pursuing diplomacy, while considering the geopolitical roots of the war.

Beck isn’t optimistic about the contemporary political system’s ability to reflect the will of its citizens. But perhaps little magazines can provide a forum to begin to imagine alternatives. N+1, Beck says, has allowed him to think beyond the bounds of mainstream media discourse—and outside the lines of academic disciplines. He has been able to do so in the way his College self wanted since reading n+1 for the first time: in a writing style rarely found in major publications, one that is irreverent, provocative, and—even when dealing with the grimmest of affairs—funny. And despite his pessimism, the premise of his book gestures toward hope: that excavating and interrogating this history can clarify the present and how citizens might change it. “I think what I hope my book can do,” Beck says, “is give people a framework for figuring out how to think about politics, living under a government that’s so uninterested in being responsive to democratic input.”

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Live Election Updates: Trump and Vance Fan Out on the Trail

Aiming to get back into the spotlight as Vice President Kamala Harris commands attention, former President Donald Trump will be in North Carolina and Senator JD Vance is headed to Michigan. Both are key swing states.

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Chris Cameron

Here’s the latest on the presidential race.

Former President Donald J. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio will campaign today in two crucial battleground states: Mr. Trump in North Carolina, a state he won by a single percentage point in 2020, and Mr. Vance in Michigan, which Mr. Trump carried in 2016 but lost four years later. The Republicans are hoping to take back some of the momentum Vice President Kamala Harris has swiftly gained since becoming the Democrats’ nominee.

Ms. Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will continue his swing of solo campaign appearances, attending fund-raisers in Denver and Boston. The Democrats picked up the endorsement of the Teamsters union’s Black caucus , though its parent union has remained silent.

Here’s what else to know:

On the trail: Mr. Trump is set to appear at a campaign event in Asheville, N.C., while Mr. Vance will campaign in Byron Center, Mich., just south of Grand Rapids. Ms. Harris is scheduled to deliver an economy-focused speech on Friday in Raleigh, N.C., and she and Mr. Walz will campaign in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania on Sunday, the day before the Democratic National Convention kicks off.

Fall races set: A pair of prominent primaries were held on Tuesday. Representative Ilhan Omar, a progressive lightning rod, won the primary for her Minnesota seat . In Wisconsin, Eric Hovde , a wealthy businessman endorsed by Donald Trump, won the G.O.P. contest to challenge Senator Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic incumbent.

Union cries foul on Trump and Musk: The United Automobile Workers union filed charges with federal labor regulators accusing Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, in their livestream this week, of voicing support for the practice of firing workers when they go on strike.

Doubling up: With Democrats gathering in Chicago for their nominating convention next week, the Harris campaign is planning for Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz to also hold a rally in Milwaukee — the same city where Republicans held their convention last month.

Arizona abortion measure: A proposal to establish a right to abortion in Arizona’s Constitution will be on the ballot in November — and it could influence turnout in the battleground state . Democrats have leveraged unhappiness about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade into gains in elections up and down the ballot over the last two years, but Republicans are betting that they can also use ballot questions to drive turnout in their favor in Arizona.

Reaching out: Mr. Trump plans to meet with Miriam Adelson , the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, after his aide sent her angry texts in his name. The messages accused her of having “RINOs” — meaning, Republicans in name only — running a super PAC, and that her late husband never would have tolerated it.

Ruth Igielnik

Harris is leading or tied with Trump in most swing states, new Cook polls find.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are locked into a tight race in key swing states, according to new polling from the Cook Political Report and the bipartisan team of BSG and GS Strategy Group published Wednesday.

The surveys, conducted between July 26 and Aug. 2, show Ms. Harris leading slightly or tied among likely voters in six of the seven battlegrounds polled — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump was ahead by a slim margin in Nevada. This is a marked change from the same surveys in May that showed Mr. Trump leading by a solid margin or tied across all seven swing states.

The reversal in North Carolina is particularly stark. Mr. Trump held one of his largest leads there in May, and the candidates are now neck-and-neck.

The new surveys also suggest that third-party candidates may be less of a factor. The inclusion of candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate, and Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, did not change the overall results across the key states.

The results are similar to recent New York Times/Siena College surveys showing Ms. Harris with a slight lead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and another indicator of how the presidential race has been remade in just a few weeks.

The Cook surveys, taken shortly after President Biden dropped out of the race and backed Ms. Harris as his successor, show Ms. Harris’s favorability ratings jumped 13 percentage points as voters got to know her as the new Democratic Party nominee. Much of that growth was driven by Democrats, but Ms. Harris also made gains with men who identify as independent, though the group still views her more negatively than positively, on balance.

There is some good news for Mr. Trump. Undecided voters, a relatively small slice of the electorate, trust Mr. Trump more on economic policy and border security and are more inflation-conscious than the electorate overall.

They are also more worried about Ms. Harris’s readiness to perform the job than they are concerned about Mr. Trump’s age. If elected, Mr. Trump, 78, would be the oldest president ever inaugurated.

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Michael Gold

In another sign of how the Trump campaign is looking to transition its attacks against Biden to attacks against Harris, it just sent out a statement that used the term “Kamalanomics,” blaming the vice president for economic policies that, for the past two years, it had laid squarely at Biden’s feet.

Neil Vigdor

Former Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, one of the seven Republicans in the chamber who voted to convict Donald J. Trump during impeachment proceedings for his actions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, now says he will vote for the former president. “I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I chose to vote for impeachment,” said Burr, who retired at the end of 2022, in an interview on Spectrum News that aired on Tuesday. “And like I say, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice that I thought a president made one time.” The Senate fell 10 votes short of the margin needed to convict Trump.

New: In a wide-ranging interview former (R) Sen. Richard Burr, who voted to convict Trump, tells me he will support Trump in November. (Interview was in July before Biden dropped out. Burr still supports Trump over Harris) Watch the Full Story: https://t.co/RzqxYJrrMV #ncpol pic.twitter.com/uURYpB5228 — Reuben Jones (@ReubenJones1) August 14, 2024

Jennifer Medina

Latino voters are significantly more supportive of Vice President Kamala Harris than they had been of President Biden before he exited the race, according to polling out today from Equis, a Democratic-leaning research group that focuses on Latinos. The new polling suggests that the Harris campaign could stave off large gains for former President Donald J. Trump among Hispanic voters, but shows that the campaign is still falling slightly short of what Biden received in 2020 .

Maggie Astor

The Teamsters’ Black caucus endorses Harris, while its parent union stays silent.

The National Black Caucus of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency on Tuesday, setting it apart from its parent union, which has declined to make an endorsement and whose president spoke at the Republican National Convention.

“Their records reflect a deep dedication to advancing labor rights and supporting working-class Americans,” the caucus said of Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in a statement announcing its endorsement. “As a key partner in leading the most pro-labor administration in our lifetimes, Vice President Harris has proven to be a tough and principled fighter for workers’ rights and a leader who delivers on her promises.”

The statement praised the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed, as well as steps his administration has taken to lower prescription drug costs and increase wages. It also credited Ms. Harris with pushing to expand the child tax credit — which the pandemic relief bill Mr. Biden signed in 2021 did temporarily, but Congress declined to do permanently — and with helping to preserve union members’ pensions .

It said that former President Donald J. Trump’s administration “was one of the most antilabor in modern history,” citing among other things his loosening of workplace safety regulations and his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage. And it criticized Mr. Trump as “contributing to a hostile environment for Black Americans.”

“Trump showed us for over 40 years who he really is: someone who is not for us,” James Curbeam, the chairman of the caucus, said in the statement. “Endorsing a candidate with his history would be a betrayal of the values that we have fought to uphold.”

The decision to endorse Ms. Harris aligns the Teamsters’ National Black Caucus with other major organized-labor institutions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the United Automobile Workers and the American Federation of Teachers. But the overall Teamsters union has not endorsed either party’s ticket.

The Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, requested speaking slots at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and spoke at the Republican convention in Milwaukee last month. (The list of speakers for the Democratic convention next week has not been finalized.) Mr. O’Brien has indicated that he is open to endorsing Mr. Trump, with whom he met privately earlier this year, as the former president tries to win support from union members, a traditionally Democratic constituency.

Mr. Curbeam, who did not immediately respond to an interview request on Wednesday, has previously condemned Mr. O’Brien’s overtures to Mr. Trump. The Harris and Trump campaigns also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Teamsters have 1.3 million members in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing and construction.

Kara Deniz, a spokeswoman for the union, said it was still conducting its endorsement process and was polling its members this month about which candidate they preferred.

“The great thing about the Teamsters is that we do have a diverse membership, and we are a democratic institution,” Ms. Deniz said. “Unlike a corporation, we uplift the voices of our membership and represent them and listen to our members’ input, and that’s exactly what we are doing right now.”

After Senator JD Vance of Ohio was named as Donald Trump's running mate last month, he also joined the former president's social media platform, Truth Social. Vance's account on the site was inactive until early this morning, when he posted a string of criticisms against his Democratic opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

In the posts, Vance denounced Harris and Walz with language he has used before, citing a wide range of topics, including the economy, immigration and transgender issues. He also criticized Harris for not taking questions from the media and attacked Walz’s military record.

Nicholas Nehamas

Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota will campaign in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania on Sunday ahead of the Democratic National Convention. They will be joined by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, and it will be the first time that all four have campaigned together.

Kate Christobek and Ben Protess

A judge denies Trump’s third request to step aside from his Manhattan criminal case.

The judge who oversaw Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial declined for a third time to step aside from the case, rebuking the former president’s lawyers for claiming that the judge had a distant yet problematic connection to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a three-page decision dated Tuesday, the judge, Justice Juan M. Merchan, slammed Mr. Trump’s filing seeking his recusal as “rife with inaccuracies” and repetitive, and dismissed the idea that he had any conflict of interest.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued that the judge’s daughter “has a longstanding relationship with Harris” — a claim her colleagues have disputed — and cited her “work for political campaigns” as a Democratic consultant. But prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which secured Mr. Trump’s conviction in May on felony charges of falsifying business records , called his request “a vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate” an issue that Justice Merchan had already twice dismissed.

Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, rejected Mr. Trump’s initial bid to oust him last year and did so again in April , on the first day of trial. The judge, who has no direct ties to Ms. Harris, cited a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, which determined that his impartiality could not reasonably be questioned based on his daughter’s interests.

Mr. Trump, who has stoked right-wing furor against the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, renewed the recusal request once President Biden abandoned his presidential campaign and Ms. Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. She is now locked in a tight race with Mr. Trump, who has falsely portrayed his conviction as a Democratic plot to foil his campaign.

“Stated plainly, defendant’s arguments are nothing more than a repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims,” Justice Merchan wrote in his latest ruling. Underscoring his frustration with the defense’s repetitive filings, he added, “this court now reiterates for the third time, that which should already be clear — innuendo and mischaracterizations do not a conflict create. Recusal is therefore not necessary, much less required.”

Justice Merchan’s decision, while anticipated, is consequential nonetheless: It enables him to soon decide two crucial matters that will shape Mr. Trump’s legal fate.

On Sept. 16, the judge is scheduled to determine whether to throw out Mr. Trump’s conviction following the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting him broad immunity for official actions as president. The former president’s long-shot request was vigorously opposed by prosecutors, who urged Justice Merchan to uphold the jury’s verdict , noting that the case had nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s official acts in the White House.

A jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Mr. Trump on all 34 counts, concluding that he had falsified records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 campaign. After his fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to bury her story of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump repaid Mr. Cohen and approved plans to lie on paperwork to hide the nature of the reimbursement, the jury found.

If Justice Merchan denies Mr. Trump’s immunity motion, as expected, Mr. Trump could mount an emergency appeal. If that fails, the judge will then proceed with Mr. Trump’s sentencing on Sept. 18. Mr. Trump faces up to four years in prison, but could receive a far shorter sentence, or even probation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked the judge to rule on the recusal first, arguing that “Decisions by Your Honor on the pending presidential immunity motion and at any sentencing would benefit not only Harris but also the professional aspirations and financial status of Your Honor’s daughter.”

But Ms. Merchan’s employer, Authentic Campaigns, has disputed Mr. Trump’s claims.

In a recent letter to the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s conviction, Authentic’s founder asserted that the company last had a contract with Mr. Biden’s campaign in 2020 and Ms. Harris’s in 2019.

The founder, Mike Nellis, also said that employees of the company had not communicated with Justice Merchan about Mr. Trump’s case.

“It is concerning that Republican members of this committee are using valuable time and taxpayer dollars to perpetuate a false right-wing conspiracy theory instead of focusing on the pressing issues facing our nation,” Mr. Nellis wrote. “This is a disgraceful misuse of power and a disservice to the American people.”

Mr. Nellis added that he and Ms. Merchan had faced death threats and harassment.

Justice Merchan has not addressed the congressional scrutiny, though in his latest ruling he implied that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were close to crossing a line. “Counsel has been warned repeatedly that such advocacy must not come at the expense of professional responsibility in one’s role as an officer of the court,” he wrote.

The judge’s coming decisions on immunity and sentencing will culminate the battle that Mr. Trump has waged with Justice Merchan since before he was arraigned.

Days before he first set foot in the judge’s courtroom, Mr. Trump blasted him on social media , saying it would be “IMPOSSIBLE” for “a Trump Hating Judge” to oversee a fair trial. Shortly before the trial, Mr. Trump also spread an online hoax that falsely claimed Loren Merchan had publicly posted an image of him behind bars.

Soon after, at the request of prosecutors, Justice Merchan expanded an existing gag order on Mr. Trump to prohibit the former president from attacking family members of prosecutors or the judge. The judge loosened the gag order after the trial, but kept in place the prohibition on attacking family members until the sentencing, a decision that a state appeals court recently upheld.

Mr. Trump has decried the gag order as unconstitutional, seeking to use it to support his bid to oust Justice Merchan from the case. The former president has also repeatedly cited the judge’s modest donations to Democratic candidates .

As the trial began, Justice Merchan denied Mr. Trump’s second request to have him removed, telling the courtroom “there is no agenda here” and “we want justice to be done.”

The Harris campaign said it would spend $90 million on advertising over the last three weeks of August, an aggressive push to reach voters in battleground states. The campaign is newly flush with cash, having raised $310 million in July, more than double what the Trump campaign brought in.

Jim Tankersley and Andrew Duehren

Reporting from Washington

Harris is set to lay out an economic message light on detail.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has generated a host of questions about her economic agenda, including how much she will stick to the details of President Biden’s positions, tweak them, or chart entirely new ones.

When she begins to roll out her policy vision this week, Ms. Harris is likely to answer only some of those questions.

During an economy-focused speech on Friday in Raleigh, N.C., Ms. Harris will outline a sort of reboot of the administration’s economic agenda, according to four people familiar with Ms. Harris’s plans.

She will lay out an approach relatively light on details, they said. It will shift emphasis from Mr. Biden’s focus on job creation and made-in-America manufacturing, and toward efforts to rein in the cost of living. But it will rarely break from Mr. Biden on substance.

That strategy reflects the advice economic aides have given Ms. Harris: to be clear and bold in talking about the economy, but not overly specific.

Her ability to do that has been effectively enabled by the unusual circumstances of Mr. Biden’s abrupt departure from the presidential race, which allowed Ms. Harris to secure the Democratic nomination without enduring a long primary campaign.

Ben Harris, a former Treasury official who formulated economic policy for Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign, said the compressed timeline meant Ms. Harris wouldn’t be able to develop a full policy agenda as candidates did in 2020.

“It’s probably unrealistic and ill-advised to run that same playbook,” he said. “My guess is that the vice president is going to look at this massive collection of Biden administration policies and emphasize the ones that are most important to her.”

The Harris campaign declined to comment on what she would propose this week.

But Ms. Harris’s team, and many of the liberal policy groups that support her, have championed the idea that her best bet is to hammer poll-tested, overarching economic themes that reflect core values and reinforce her political biography — and mostly leave the white papers until after the election.

The resulting plan, devised by Ms. Harris with a group of advisers that includes prominent alumni of Mr. Biden’s administration, is likely to go further than Mr. Biden has in office to attack large corporations for using their market power to raise prices. That argument polls well with swing voters and is partly an attempt to divert blame for the high inflation Americans experienced early in Mr. Biden’s term.

Aides say it also fits with Ms. Harris’s efforts to emphasize her career as a prosecutor who supports business but has cracked down on corporate lawbreakers.

In her speech, according to those familiar with her plans, Ms. Harris will call for expanding the child tax credit, along with higher taxes on corporations and high earners, in line with Mr. Biden’s budget proposals in office. She will also push for more affordable housing, among other measures.

In her campaign, Ms. Harris has already called for raising the minimum wage and providing paid leave for workers. She has defended the independence of the Federal Reserve.

While those goals align with established Democratic positions, Ms. Harris is not expected anytime soon to say how high the minimum wage should be raised, for example, or offer a detailed plan addressing the raft of individual tax cuts that are set to expire next year.

The strategic vagueness is an important, if subtle, shift from Mr. Biden, who as president has released reams of detailed policy plans. Some of Ms. Harris’s advisers believe that appearing as a relative blank slate on key issues — like trade and taxes — could help attract support from business groups put off by some of Mr. Biden’s policies.

Such an approach could also provide fewer targets for attack on policy particulars, the reasoning goes.

It’s a fine line for someone serving as Mr. Biden’s No. 2. Many of the formal and informal economic advisers to Ms. Harris’s campaign, including Mike Pyle, Gene Sperling, Bharat Ramamurti and Brian Deese, previously held senior posts in the Biden administration. Mr. Deese was Mr. Biden’s first director of the National Economic Council and helped develop much of his vast legislative agenda. Mr. Pyle was chief economist to Ms. Harris as vice president and later a top economic aide on Mr. Biden’s National Security Council.

Ms. Harris has disavowed some of her positions from her short-lived bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Aides say she no longer supports a fracking ban, Medicare for All and other measures she proposed in that campaign that were meant to win progressive votes.

Campaign officials have pointed reporters instead to Mr. Biden’s most recent budget as a blueprint of sorts for Ms. Harris’s eventual positions. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris were “on the same page” on policy.

“I don’t think we should overstate the mystery here — she’s been part of these policy proposals for the last four years,” said Michael Linden, a former staff member in the White House budget office under Mr. Biden.

Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly tied Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s agenda, which they attack as a failure. In surveys, Americans give consistently poor reviews to Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, and Mr. Trump regularly outpaced Mr. Biden in polls asking voters whom they trusted more to handle the economy.

Without Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, though, Ms. Harris may have more appeal, even if she makes few substantive changes to the policies he was running on.

Many veterans of Democratic policymaking say Ms. Harris should use her speech on Friday, and the Democratic National Convention next week, to turn economic issues to her advantage and embrace policies meant to attract struggling middle-class voters.

“When she leaves the convention on Friday morning, voters should have greater confidence in her ability to manage the economy,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. He said he hoped Ms. Harris would lean into messages on energy independence , deficit reduction and help for rural America, among others.

Ms. Harris has selectively detailed some policy positions. Her campaign has said she supports Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household making less than $400,000 a year, and she also recently endorsed a plan first floated by Mr. Trump to stop collecting taxes on tips. While both major party candidates are behind this idea, tax experts have panned it , arguing that it would unfairly give one type of earnings an advantage over others.

Mr. Trump has skimped on policy specifics, as he did in previous campaigns. He has promised a wide range of tax cuts as the core of his economic agenda, but has not put forth a detailed tax proposal. Some of his plans build on his policies in office, like further reducing a corporate tax rate he cut in 2017, and others are new, like exempting Social Security benefits from taxation.

Much of what Ms. Harris is expected to outline in broad strokes this week — which includes expanding the child tax credit — failed in Congress when Democrats last controlled it. Moderate Democrats balked at the cost of many of those programs, while other slices of Mr. Biden’s agenda, like subsidies for clean-energy technology, became law.

Many in the party are eager to revisit what they see as unfinished business from Mr. Biden’s term. That eagerness, along with the truncated nature of Ms. Harris’s campaign, appears to have relieved the pressure that progressive groups put on Democratic candidates in recent presidential primaries — which often featured long-running debates on the details of how best to tax the rich or provide health care for all Americans.

Felicia Wong, president of Roosevelt Forward, a progressive advocacy group, said she didn’t necessarily expect detailed proposals from Ms. Harris — or see that lack of detail as a problem.

And even if Ms. Harris was elected, Ms. Wong said, policy details were going to depend heavily on the makeup of Congress — Ms. Harris’s approach to child care, for example, might look quite different if Democrats controlled both houses.

“If you’re going to have a policy design conversation — which I think we should — I don’t know that that has to happen at the campaign level,” Ms. Wong said. “So I’m not that worried about it.”

Ben Casselman contributed reporting from New York.

Representative Ilhan Omar, a vocal critic of Israel and ‘squad’ member, wins her Minnesota primary.

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the progressive lightning rod whose unabated criticism of Israel has deepened the fissures in the Democratic Party over the war in Gaza, won her primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

While she prevailed, it has been a rocky summer for the “squad,” the ultraliberal faction of lawmakers in the House.

Two other members of the group, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri , suffered primary defeats in June and August after pro-Israel groups spent millions trying to influence those contests.

Ms. Omar, 41, who is seeking a fourth term in Congress, heavily outspent her three opponents, including Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member, who came within 2,500 votes of ousting her in the 2022 primary. Unlike several other primary contests, Ms. Omar’s race did not see a large amount of campaign spending originating outside the district.

Midway through Donald J. Trump’s presidency in 2018, Ms. Omar was one of several women of color on the far left of the Democratic Party who were elected to the House . That group includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

Mr. Trump famously said in 2019 that Ms. Omar and those other three women should “go back” to their countries, though she was the only one not born in the United States.

Ms. Omar, who was born in Somalia and is one of two Muslim women in the House, has faced backlash for her criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian beliefs.

In 2023, Republicans in the House ousted Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee in a party-line vote over her past comments about Israel that had been widely condemned as antisemitic.

While showing her support for pro-Palestinian protesters at a Columbia University encampment in April, Ms. Omar created a furor when she suggested that some Jewish students were “pro-genocide.” Her daughter had been one of several students who were suspended for participating in the encampment .

A crucial Senate race in Wisconsin is set, with Eric Hovde facing Senator Tammy Baldwin.

Eric Hovde, a wealthy businessman, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Wisconsin on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up a key race this fall with Senator Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic incumbent.

The race was called with just 4 percent of the vote counted, with Mr. Hovde holding large leads on his challengers: Charles Barman, a construction superintendent, and Rejani Raveendran, a nurse and midwife studying at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Ms. Baldwin’s seat is one of more than a half-dozen held by Democrats that Republicans are targeting this year. To regain control of the Senate, Republicans need to flip just one or two — depending on whether the party wins the presidency — and they are almost guaranteed to pick up one seat in West Virginia, where Senator Joe Manchin III is not running for re-election.

Mr. Hovde, the multimillionaire founder of H Bancorp and the chief executive of a real estate development company, has had several false starts in his political career. He financed a failed Senate campaign in 2012 with $5.8 million from his personal fortune before ultimately losing the Republican primary . He later considered other runs for Senate and governor, but decided against them.

Mr. Hovde is one of several Republican Senate candidates this year who are in a position to self-fund their campaigns, allowing the party to devote more of its resources elsewhere. Mr. Hovde has so far pumped at least $13 million of his own money into the campaign.

He has presented his wealth as a positive, saying it means he doesn’t need “special-interest money” and can be more independent, and pledging to donate his Senate salary to charity if he is elected.

Ms. Baldwin, who was uncontested in the Democratic primary, has sought to cast him as out of touch with regular Americans, and as a carpetbagger because he owns property in California and has split his time between there and Wisconsin. He has been registered to vote in Wisconsin since 2012.

He also drew criticism this year for suggesting that “almost nobody in a nursing home” is mentally competent to vote, saying he had gained expertise regarding nursing homes because the bank he owns lends to them.

Like several of her fellow Democratic Senate candidates, Ms. Baldwin — who has the advantage of incumbency, even though Wisconsin is a competitive state — appears to be running ahead of her party’s presidential ticket. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month found her leading Mr. Hovde by eight percentage points, outstripping Vice President Kamala Harris’s four-point lead over Donald J. Trump in Wisconsin.

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Donald Trump plans to meet with Miriam Adelson after his aide sent her angry texts in his name.

Donald J. Trump is planning to meet privately this week with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the Republican donor he attacked over text messages sent by his aide late last month, according to two people with knowledge of the plans.

Mr. Trump’s team had asked Mrs. Adelson to attend an event focused on his Jewish supporters to be held at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., this week, according to the people with knowledge of the plans. They are also supposed to speak privately while there, one of the people said.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment. An adviser to Mrs. Adelson did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Mrs. Adelson, who was born in Israel and is a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state, earlier this year reconstituted a super PAC the Adelsons had backed previously, Preserve America, with plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in support of Mr. Trump.

But on July 25, just days after Mr. Trump and Mrs. Adelson had met privately at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump sent Mrs. Adelson text messages through his aide, Natalie Harp, accusing her of having “RINOs” — Republicans in Name Only — running the group, and that her late husband never would have tolerated it. At the time, Preserve America was spending $18 million on ads in three battleground states in support of Mr. Trump.

The text messages were jarring to Mrs. Adelson, according to people with knowledge of what took place. The messages prompted concerns about whether she might curtail her support for him, although those worries appear to have dissipated. Her advisers later discovered that Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire former chief executive of Marvel Entertainment who is supporting a rival super PAC, had encouraged the attacks on Mrs. Adelson.

Mr. Perlmutter, who is said to have hoped for Mrs. Adelson’s financial support to be routed through the super PAC he is backing, acknowledged to an adviser to Mrs. Adelson that he had helped spur Mr. Trump’s broadsides, according to the people with knowledge of what took place.

Mr. Trump has been struggling to find his footing, after President Biden abruptly ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who has pulled even with Mr. Trump in several polls.

Kellen Browning

Reporting from Los Angeles

Walz forcefully defends his military record in his first solo campaign stop.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota defended himself against Republican attacks on his military service record on Tuesday in his first solo campaign event since being named Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Speaking at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees convention in Los Angeles, Mr. Walz responded directly for the first time to the claims pushed by former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign that he exaggerated his military record to suggest he had served in combat when he had not, and that he left his Army National Guard unit to run for public office in order to avoid deploying to Iraq.

“I am damn proud of my service to this country,” Mr. Walz said. “And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record.”

Mr. Walz retired from the National Guard in 2005 after 24 years, a year before his artillery battalion deployed to Iraq. At the time of his retirement, soldiers knew a deployment was possible, but the actual orders came months after Mr. Walz, then 41, had already left to run for a seat in the House of Representatives . On Tuesday, he framed that decision as another act of service.

“In 2005, I felt the call of duty again, this time paying service to my country in the halls of Congress,” Mr. Walz said. Without referring to him by name, he addressed Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, who has led the “stolen valor” attacks against him and who also served in the military.

“To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words: Thank you for your service and sacrifice,” Mr. Walz said.

Mr. Walz did not directly address Mr. Vance’s claims that he had misrepresented his record to include combat.

Speaking about gun control in 2018, when he was a member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Walz said “we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.”

He deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but did not serve in a combat zone. The Harris campaign has said that Mr. Walz misspoke.

Absent a roaring crowd of more than 10,000 packed inside a stadium or airplane hangar and without serving as Ms. Harris’s opening act — the norm for the Democratic ticket over the past week — Mr. Walz gave a 20-minute address to union members that was slightly less raucous than his previous speeches. But his tone and demeanor otherwise mirrored last week’s series of appearances.

Mr. Walz, a former teacher — and, as he noted, the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan — framed himself and Ms. Harris as warriors for the working class, highlighting pro-labor bills he signed in Minnesota and his support for federal legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act , a labor rights bill.

By contrast, Mr. Walz painted Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance as out-of-touch elitists.

“Can you picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to run a McFlurry machine?” Mr. Walz asked, invoking Ms. Harris’s time working at the fast-food chain when she was a student. “The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them.”

As governor, Mr. Walz’s own record on labor is not entirely without blemishes. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed a minimum wage and other labor protections to gig drivers who work for Uber and Lyft, siding with the ridesharing companies’ arguments that the minimum pay was too high for the region and would have required them to curtail their businesses in Minnesota and pass on costs to riders. (He signed a similar bill with a lower base pay rate this year.)

Mr. Walz is coming off a string of battleground state rallies that welcomed him to the ticket, and the Los Angeles stop was the first of many events for him this week. He is set to attend a fund-raiser in Newport Beach, Calif., also on Tuesday, and attend fund-raisers in Denver, Boston, Newport, R.I., and Southampton, N.Y., later in the week.

Ms. Harris’s choice of Mr. Walz has seemed to turbocharge the enthusiasm unleashed by her own candidacy. He has leaned on his Midwestern appeal on the stump, while promising he and Ms. Harris would bring joy and lightness back to politics.

Supporters who attended last week’s rallies said they viewed Mr. Walz as “America’s dad,” and they were invigorated by the progressive policies he has signed into law in Minnesota.

But his rollout has not come without scrutiny, some of it inaccurate or misleading . Republicans have seized on his handling of the riots that broke out in Minneapolis in 2020 after a police officer was filmed murdering George Floyd, arguing he did not move quick enough to quell the unrest, looting and arson, and was slow to send in the National Guard. They have derided some of his policies , such as the bill he signed last year requiring menstrual products to be available in the bathrooms of all schools to accommodate transgender students.

Above all, they have hammered Mr. Walz over his military service.

The attacks are reminiscent of the sort deployed against Senator John Kerry in 2004, when he was the Democratic nominee running against President George W. Bush. Chris LaCivita, the co-chair of Mr. Trump’s campaign, was also one of the architects of the “Swift Boat” attacks against Mr. Kerry, which successfully cast doubt on his military service in Vietnam.

The U.A.W. files labor charges against Trump and Musk over an interview.

The United Automobile Workers union filed charges with federal labor regulators on Tuesday accusing former President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk of threatening workers during a livestreamed conversation a day earlier.

The union, which has backed Vice President Kamala Harris, accused Mr. Trump of violating the law by voicing support for the practice of firing workers when they go on strike, an approach the former president suggested Mr. Musk had embraced.

In the glitch-delayed conversation on X, Mr. Trump described Mr. Musk as the “greatest cutter” of workers. He claimed Mr. Musk has responded to striking workers by saying, “That’s OK — you’re all gone.” Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, laughed in response, but did not directly address Mr. Trump’s remark before the former president changed the topic.

While Mr. Musk does have a reputation as a ruthless job-cutter — particularly at X, formerly Twitter, where he laid off roughly half the work force shortly after buying the company — and has been found to have engaged in anti-union tactics, Mr. Trump may have conflated different episodes across Mr. Musk’s business empire. Mr. Musk was found by the National Labor Relations Board in 2021 to have illegally fired a single Tesla employee for engaging in union activity. The board also accused him this year of illegally firing employees at SpaceX, but that involved a letter the workers circulated that was critical of Mr. Musk.

The N.L.R.B. said it had received unfair labor practice allegations against Mr. Trump’s campaign and Tesla. Regional offices for the board will investigate, said Kayla Blado, an N.L.R.B. spokeswoman.

Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment. On X, Mr. Musk insulted Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Brian Hughes, called the complaint against Mr. Trump a “shameless political stunt intended to erode” the former president’s support from American workers.

Mark Gaston Pearce, who was chair of the N.L.R.B. under President Barack Obama, said the U.A.W. was making a “novel” use of labor law in targeting a politician. But, he said, unless the union is able to show that Mr. Trump was speaking on behalf of Mr. Musk’s companies, “It’s not likely a charge is going to be able to stick.”

Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for employers to threaten to fire workers in retaliation for union activity.

Mr. Fain said in a statement that “Trump stands against everything our union stands for.”

He added, “Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly.”

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