Israel’s High-Stakes Election, and How Illegal Gold Is Getting Into the Global Market

The New York Times’ The Headlines opens with a striking detail: President Trump has endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of next week’s election, calling him “strong, brave, and brilliant”—this despite months of increasingly tense relations between the two leaders over their countries’ joint war in Iran. Netanyahu, locked in a razor-thin race, thanked Trump and released a video telling Israelis to “listen carefully” to the U.S. president. But the endorsement is just one thread in a broader episode that moves from Israel’s existential election to France’s weekend of peaceful protests and arson, a Times investigation exposing the fiction of “clean gold,” and the scientific hunt for planets more habitable than Earth.

Israel’s Referendum on Netanyahu and the Country’s Future