BIDEN VOWS TO GUIDE U.S. OUT OF DARKNESS · 13 hours ago  · Mr. Biden s appearance was an...

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A $600 million settlement over tapwater tainted with lead still needsapproval from a federal court. PAGE A18

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Flint Payout Aims at ChildrenBruce Pascoe, above, wants to use hiswriting to revive the Aboriginal com-munity in Australia. PAGE C12

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Hope in an Indigenous Future

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Many Schools Lack a NurseThe Trump administration’s demand forinternational sanctions against Irancould weaken American authorityaround the world. PAGE A11

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New Sign of Stalling Economy

swing state of Pennsylvania, hasbeen the greatest unifying forceat the Democratic convention,given that loathing him is the onething that everyone in the frac-tious party can agree on.

Mr. Biden and the Democratsspent the week prosecutingarguments against him onCovid-19, unemployment, healthcare, child care, climate change,foreign policy and his fundamen-tal fitness for the presidency —attacks that only presaged a fallcampaign that, even when itfeatures Mr. Biden, will be aimedentirely at drawing contrastswith Mr. Trump.

“He’ll wake up every daybelieving the job is all about him,never about you,” Mr. Biden said

As the newly minted leader ofthe Democratic Party, Joseph R.Biden used his acceptancespeech on Thursday night to layout an unusually personal mes-sage for the fall campaign, link-ing his heart-rending biographyof setback and recovery to thelives of Americans hoping fortheir own rebound in a season ofhardships.

But looming over Mr. Biden’slong-sought presidential nomina-tion was the ever-present shad-ow of another man who’s poisedto dominate the final 10 weeks ofthe campaign and use his consid-erable megaphone to drown outMr. Biden’s pitch: Donald J.Trump.

The president, who spent theday attacking Mr. Biden in the Continued on Page A15

After Four Nights in Spotlight, Democrats Point It at Trump

By JONATHAN MARTIN and SHANE GOLDMACHER

NEWS ANALYSIS

MOSCOW — Booked on anearly morning flight back to Mos-cow, Aleksei A. Navalny began hisday with a rushed breakfast —just a cup of tea in a plastic cup —at the airport in the Siberian cityof Tomsk. Soon after his flight tookoff Thursday, he rushed to the toi-let feeling violently ill.

Just a few hundred miles into itsnearly 2,000-mile flight, the planemade an emergency landing, andMr. Navalny, Russia’s most promi-nent opposition leader, groaningin agony before losing conscious-ness, was taken on a gurney to anambulance waiting on the tarmac.

Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman,Kira Yarmysh, who was travelingwith him, announced on Twitterthat he had been poisoned, proba-bly by something put in his tea atthe airport’s Vienna Café. Mr. Na-valny, who has often describedPresident Vladimir V. Putin as theleader of a “party of crooks andthieves,” had traveled to Siberia tohelp organize opposition candi-dates ahead of local elections next

month.Doctors at the No. 1 Clinical

Hospital in Omsk, the Siberiancity where the plane made itsemergency landing, initially saidthat Mr. Navalny was on a ventila-tor in serious condition. It later re-ported that his condition, thoughstill grave, had stabilized.

As alarm that Mr. Navalnymight die receded, speculation offoul play escalated, particularlyafter his personal physician and

As Top Putin Foe Is Hospitalized,Suspicions of Poison in His Tea

By ANDREW HIGGINS

Aleksei A. Navalny, on Thurs-day in a video on social media.

Continued on Page A9

Late last month, as the TexasRepublican Party was shiftinginto campaign mode, it unveiled anew slogan, lifting a rallying crystraight from a once-unthinkablesource: the internet-driven con-spiracy theory known as QAnon.

The new catchphrase, “We Arethe Storm,” is an unsubtle cue to agroup that the F.B.I. has labeled apotential domestic terroristthreat. It is instantly recognizableamong QAnon adherents, signal-ing what they claim is a comingconflagration between PresidentTrump and what they allege,falsely, is a cabal of Satan-wor-shiping pedophile Democrats whoseek to dominate America and theworld.

The slogan can be found all oversocial media posts by QAnon fol-lowers, and now, too, in emailsfrom the Texas Republican Partyand on the T-shirts, hats andsweatshirts that it sells. It haseven worked its way into the par-ty’s text message system — a re-cent email from the party urgedreaders to “Text STORM2020” forupdates.

The Texas Republicans are anunusually visible example of theRepublican Party’s dalliance withQAnon, but they are hardlyunique. A small but growing num-ber of Republicans — including aheavily favored Republican con-gressional candidate in Georgia —are donning the QAnon mantle,ushering its adherents in from the

troll-infested fringes of the inter-net and potentially transformingthe wild conspiracy theory into anoffline political movement, withsupporters running for Congressand flexing their political muscleat the state and local levels.

Chief among the party’s QAnonpromoters is Mr. Trump himself.

More in G.O.P. Speak the Language of QAnonBy MATTHEW ROSENBERG

and MAGGIE HABERMAN

QAnon recently received verbal support from President Trump.TOM BRENNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Continued on Page A17

Stephen K. Bannon, PresidentTrump’s former adviser and an ar-chitect of his 2016 general electioncampaign, was charged on Thurs-day with defrauding donors to aprivate fund-raising effort calledWe Build the Wall, which was in-tended to bolster the president’ssignature initiative along theMexican border.

Mr. Bannon, working with awounded Air Force veteran and aFlorida venture capitalist, con-spired to cheat hundreds of thou-sands of donors by falsely promis-ing that their money had been setaside for new sections of wall, ac-cording to a federal indictment un-sealed in Manhattan.

The fund-raising effort col-lected more than $25 million, andprosecutors said Mr. Bannon usednearly $1 million of it for personalexpenses.

Despite the populist aura hetries to project, Mr. Bannon isknown to enjoy the high life, andhe was arrested at 7:15 a.m. on a$35 million, 150-foot yacht belong-ing to one of his business associ-ates, the fugitive Chinese billion-aire Guo Wengui, law enforce-ment officials said.

Working with the Coast Guard,special agents from the UnitedStates attorney’s office in Manhat-tan and federal postal inspectorsboarded the yacht off Westbrook,Conn., the officials said. Mr. Ban-non, 66, was on deck, drinking cof-fee and reading a book, when theraid occurred.

The criminal charges, filed aweek before Mr. Trump was to ac-cept the Republican nominationfor a second term, marked a starkturn of fortune for the flamboyantpolitical strategist. Mr. Bannonfirst came to prominence when hewas in charge of the right-wing

Bannon FacesFraud ChargeIn Wall Project

This article is by Alan Feuer,William K. Rashbaum and MaggieHaberman.

Continued on Page A19

Joe Biden tells funny stories atfunerals and sad ones at cam-paign stops.

He has been running for presi-dent long enough to lose the 1988Democratic primary as a hard-charging 40-something pushinggenerational change — and to winthe 2020 primary as the white-haired statesman who has steeredthrough sorrow, who can still sniffit out in any room and close in likea pang-seeking missile for thestricken.

“He asked if I was OK and gaveme a hug,” a cane-shuffling Iowaman, Brian Peters, said last win-ter, blinking away tears afterpledging his support to Mr. Bidenon a characteristically misty post-event rope line. “I told him that Iwould be.”

Maybe it had to happen thisway, friends say, if it was going tohappen at all: After nearly a half-century of public life defined mostviscerally by the forced commin-

gling of politics and personal loss,the tint of the moment at lastmatches Mr. Biden’s own story:shadowed by despair, sustainedby faith — in himself; in God; inthe human capacity for resilience,founded or not.

“We all are an accumulation ofour life’s experiences,” said JoeRiley, a friend of Mr. Biden’s andthe former longtime mayor ofCharleston, S.C.

And Joseph Robinette BidenJr.’s experiences have deliveredhim here. He has at last capturedthe Democratic presidential nomi-nation, winning the chance to facePresident Trump because he is,admirers say, all the things thatthe incumbent is not: empathetic,dependable, decent.

“Character is on the ballot,” Mr.Biden said in his convention ad-dress Thursday evening, inside aquiet hall in Wilmington, Del.“Compassion is on the ballot.”

There is some irony, Democratsconcede, in the idea that Mr. Bidenprevailed because voters foundhim comforting and familiar.Through his years in presidentialpolitics, his longevity has general-ly served to remind his skeptics ofall they believe he has gottenwrong: He voted to authorize theuse of military force in Iraq andcame to regret it. He presided overthe committee that subjectedAnita Hill to demeaning and inva-sive questioning in the SupremeCourt confirmation hearings fornow-Justice Clarence Thomas. Hehelped craft tough-on-crime legis-lation that many criminal justiceexperts now associate with massincarceration.

In this primary campaign, Mr.Biden, 77, could often appear al-most willfully out of step with the

Despair, Detours and the Fulfillment of a DreamBy MATT FLEGENHEIMER For Biden, Line Blurs

Between Politics andPersonal Losses

Continued on Page A13

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Fleeing Fires for Virus Danger

Joseph R. Biden Jr. accepted theDemocratic presidential nomina-tion on Thursday night, beginninga general-election challenge toPresident Trump that Democratshave cast as a rescue mission for acountry equally besieged by acrippling pandemic and a WhiteHouse defined by incompetence,racism and abuse of power.

Speaking before a row of flagsin his home state of Delaware, Mr.Biden urged Americans to havefaith that they could “overcomethis season of darkness,” andpledged that he would seek tobridge the country’s political divi-sions in ways Mr. Trump had not.

“The current president hascloaked America in darkness formuch too long — too much anger,too much fear, too much division,”Mr. Biden said. “Here and now, Igive you my word: If you entrustme with the presidency, I willdraw on the best of us, not theworst. I will be an ally of the light,not the darkness.”

Mr. Biden’s appearance was anemphatic closing argument in afour-day virtual convention inwhich Democrats presented abroad coalition of women, youngpeople and racial minorities while

going to unusual lengths to wel-come Republicans and independ-ent voters seeking relief from thetumult of the Trump era.

The former vice president al-luded to that outreach, saying thatwhile he is a Democratic candi-date, he will be “an Americanpresident.” And in an implicit con-trast with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bidensaid he would “work hard forthose who didn’t support me.”

“This is not a partisan mo-ment,” he said. “This must be anAmerican moment.”

The party has offered Mr. Bi-den, 77, less as a traditional parti-san standard-bearer than as acomforting national healer, capa-ble of restoring normalcy andcalm to the United States and re-turning its federal government toworking order. He has cam-paigned as an apostle of personaldecency and political conciliation,and as a transitional figure whowould take on some of the worstAmerican crises — not just the co-ronavirus outbreak but also eco-nomic inequality, climate changeand gun violence — before hand-ing off power to another genera-tion.

BIDEN VOWS TO GUIDE U.S. OUT OF ‘DARKNESS’Accepting Nomination, He Rebukes Trump

and Pledges to ‘Draw on the Best of Us’

By ALEXANDER BURNS and KATIE GLUECK

“This is not a partisan moment,” Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in closing the Democratic convention. “This must be an American moment.”ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Continued on Page A14

VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,792 © 2020 The New York Times Company FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2020 Printed in Chicago $3.00

Sunny and warm. Highs in 80s to90s. Mostly clear tonight. Lows inupper 50s to 60s. Sunny to partlycloudy tomorrow. Highs in lower90s. Weather map is on Page A22.

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