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Preliminary results today showed that the parties of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival, Benny Gantz, appeared to have won the same number of seats in the Israeli Parliament, but that Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party had stronger potential partners for a coalition government. Here are the latest updates.
A victory for Mr. Netanyahu would result in his fourth consecutive term, and fifth overall, and probably make him Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. It would also provide him with a renewed mandate as he fights charges of bribery and corruption.
Closer look: Mr. Netanyahu is widely credited with having built a strong economy and keeping Israel secure. He has also delivered long-sought diplomatic victories, several of them with the help of President Trump.
What’s next: President Reuven Rivlin in the next few days is expected to choose the party leader he believes has the best chance of assembling a parliamentary majority.
In his more than three months as acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney has encouraged President Trump’s instincts where his predecessors often tried to restrain them.
Two of our White House correspondents report: “Some outsiders see the cascade of hard-line policy ventures, unorthodox appointments and high-level purges of recent days as a sign of Mr. Mulvaney’s expanding influence, assuming that he is pushing Mr. Trump to the right. But insiders call that a misconception, insisting that Mr. Mulvaney at most is pushing on an open door and otherwise is merely liberating Mr. Trump to pursue the courses he prefers.”
Yesterday:Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers that White House lawyers had been in touch with his department about a congressional request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Separately, Attorney General William Barr said he would release a redacted version of the special counsel’s report “within a week.”
The senator and early front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination plans to reintroduce his Medicare for All Act today, an effort to offer all Americans health insurance under a single plan run by the government and financed by taxpayers.
Mr. Sanders ran for president as an outsider in 2016, but his brand of democratic socialism has taken root on the Democratic left. The co-sponsors of his Medicare for All bill include at least four Senate Democrats who are running against him.
The details: The Times asked a handful of economists and think tanks with a range of perspectives to estimate total health care expenditures in 2019 under a Medicare for All plan. The range of responses, and the things that all the experts agree on, offer a look at what would be the largest domestic policy change in a generation.
Perspective: In an Op-Ed, a writer with Type 1 diabetes discusses the skyrocketing price of insulin, and how even those with health insurance are having financial trouble.
