--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 1st. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: At 2 a.m. local time in Israel, the government announced that Israeli forces had crossed the border into Lebanon, the beginning of a ground invasion. A Times reporter near the border saw Israeli troops equipped with night vision goggles traveling in Humvees, along with dozens of tanks and bulldozers.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: As of this morning, Israeli fighter helicopters have been carrying out strikes, and clouds of smoke are rising over villages in southern Lebanon. Israel says it's focused on Hezbollah targets in the border region.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Iran-backed militant group has been firing rockets from there at Israel for the last year, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. Israel is saying this is a limited operation, and we understand from officials that we've been talking to that it mostly at the moment involves commando units advancing into the border area, not advancing towards major cities, let alone towards Beirut.
--:-- Patrick Kingsley: I'm the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times. The invasion comes after weeks of intense Israeli airstrikes that have killed top Hezbollah commanders and hundreds of civilians in Lebanon.
--:-- Patrick Kingsley: It remains to be seen whether this invasion will indeed remain limited. There is always mission creep in these kinds of invasions. We've seen Israel say one thing at the start of ground operations in Gaza before, seeing those operations morph into something bigger than was previously stated.
--:-- Patrick Kingsley: The current goal, according to the Israeli government, is to make the border areas safe enough for roughly 65,000 displaced Israelis who have been forced to leave their homes over the last year due to Hezbollah rocket fire.
--:-- Patrick Kingsley: But quite what counts as safe enough is unclear, and it could be that that concept evolves over time. And in the meantime, there are hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians on the other side of the border who are now displaced from their homes.
--:-- Patrick Kingsley: And it's unclear when they will be able to return themselves. American officials tell The Times they've been assured by Israel that it does not intend to occupy southern Lebanon in the long term.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Pentagon said that it's sending several thousand additional U.S. forces to the Middle East to help defend Israel, adding to the 40 U troops already stationed in the region.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I want to express condolences to all the families whose loved ones have died or are missing. Matter of fact, it's almost equally as bad missing, not knowing whether or not your brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter are alive.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, officials say hundreds of people are still missing as rescue teams try and reach remote areas that were devastated by Hurricane Helene.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: President Biden said as many as 600 people are unaccounted for, with cell service down, roads destroyed, and no way to check on them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One North Carolina resident said he and his neighbors had used saws and pry bars to free people who were trapped after the storm toppled trees and sent water raging through narrow valleys.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In Asheville, the city's infrastructure is so badly damaged that officials are bringing in drinking water on trucks, and more than 1.5 million people across six states still don't have power.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Biden, who said he'll travel to see the storm damage tomorrow, warned that the recovery will take a, quote, hell of a long time.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In New York City tonight, J.D. Vance and Tim Walls will face off in the one and only vice presidential debate of the 2024 campaign.
--:-- Kellen Browning: I'll be watching for how the dynamic between Walls and Vance will play out in front of voters.
--:-- Kellen Browning: Since going on the campaign trail, Tim Walls has simply not had to respond to tough scrutiny the same way J.D. Vance has.
--:-- Kellen Browning: Vance has taken questions from reporters at campaign rallies in front of attendees, and he's spent much more time on television news shows and doing tough, combative interviews.
--:-- Kellen Browning: Tim Walls, by contrast, has simply not been taking questions from reporters. He's done a few small television interviews, but it'll be interesting to see on a bigger stage if he is able to stand up to the scrutiny that we anticipate will come from J.D. Vance.
--:-- Kellen Browning: One thing I'll be watching for from Tim Walls tonight is how he handles questions relating to immigration and the southern border.
--:-- Kellen Browning: Tim Walls has not spoken extensively about border policy on the campaign trail to this point. And so we expect J.D. Vance to talk quite a bit about the southern border and the Biden-Harris administration's approach to the migrant crisis.
--:-- Kellen Browning: And my colleagues and I spent several hours watching old debate footage from Tim Walls. And he speaks about the border in humanitarian terms essentially emphasizing the humanity of the problem and how immigrants are not bringing crime but actually they helping the economy.
--:-- Kellen Browning: The question will be will he continue with that humanitarian tone or will he make efforts to be more strict toward the border and match some of Kamala Harris more recent language on the subject.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The debate begins at 9 p.m. Eastern. You can watch live with moment-by-moment analysis from Times reporters on the New York Times app or at nytimes.com.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: While the race for the White House continues, today marks a major milestone for one former president. It's Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Carter entered hospice care last year, and at the time, his family and friends thought he had only days left to live. Now, he's the first president in American history to reach triple digits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: People close to Carter say he's frail and mostly stays in his modest ranch home in Plains, Georgia. But in the last few months, he's become more engaged. He follows the Atlanta Braves, listens to Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers, and checks on the work of the philanthropic center that he and his wife Rosalyn founded.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Carter has said in the past that he doesn't particularly care about this big birthday. Instead, he's looking ahead to Election Day, when he's planning to cast his vote for Kamala Harris.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In 1977, I went on strike with the old guys for three months for 80 cents. And it wasn't nice. Fast forward. Now they're making billions and billions of dollars.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Almost 50,000 longshoremen have walked off the job after 11th-hour contract negotiations fell apart last night. Longshoremen are the workers who move containers off of ships, sort them, and put them on trucks and trains to crisscross the U.S.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Ports cannot operate without them. The strike is going to cut off most trade coming into East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, where more than half of container shipments come into the U.S.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The sticking points in the failed negotiations have been wages, benefits, and job security. Longshoremen is one of the few blue-collar jobs that can pay more than $100,000 a year, and the unions worried that new technology will mean that companies cut jobs.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One of the things that's upsetting the longshoremen is the greater use of automated technology in the ports. I was at a port in Virginia where there is quite a lot of automated machinery, and you could see the cranes working without humans, that is what they're against.
--:-- Peter Evis: I've been covering the negotiations. Port operators argue that they need to modernize the ports and that busier ports will mean more jobs not less.
--:-- Peter Evis: But the two sides are at an impasse. This strike at the East and Gulf Coast ports could send a chill through the economy.
--:-- Peter Evis: Shutting down the ports could cost the U.S. economy up to $5 billion a day, according to some estimates. And then the longer the strike is, the more the delays will cause shortages, and that could push up prices and increase freight costs.
--:-- Peter Evis: And some of those freight costs could be passed on to consumers just as they're getting over high inflation of the last few years.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally. There it is! Rose has a quick stop. That's number 4,192.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Pete Rose, one of baseball's greatest and most controversial players, has died at age 83.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Rose, who was literally born on Major League Baseball's opening day in 1941, had more hits than any other player in the history of the sport.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He spent most of his career with his hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds. And over the course of his career, he played in 17 All-Star games in five different positions.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He went on to manage the Reds, but he fell from grace in a spectacularly public way when he was banned from baseball for life in 1989 because of his gambling habit.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Rose vehemently denied that he'd ever bet on baseball, despite a pile of evidence, until the early 2000s when he admitted to it.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: You're now saying, for the first time, publicly, yes, I bet on baseball. I bet on baseball in 1987 and 1988. Did you bet on your own team? Yes.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: As part of the fallout from his gambling, Rose was made ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, where he otherwise surely would have been inducted.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In an interview just a few months ago, Rose said he was still hoping they would let him in. I always believe in baseball, and I believe somewhere in the future, baseball will give me a second chance. That's all I can go on.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, more on-the-ground details from the damage of Hurricane Helene. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.
