A Cease-Fire in Doubt

Good morning. At the NATO summit in Turkey today, President Trump put the cease-fire with Iran into doubt. “To me, I think it’s over,” he said. We’ll start with that.

Then we’ll look at the mess in Maine, with the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign for the Senate.

A threatened cease-fire

The United States and Iran traded strikes last night, about a month after leaders of both countries signed a preliminary cease-fire deal.

The American military said it had hit 80 targets across Iran after Iran attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil and gas shipping route. In response, Iran said it had targeted U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.

The preliminary truce was intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow longer negotiations toward permanently ending the war. Both goals are in question now.

The price of oil spiked after the attacks — and jumped again after Trump’s remarks.

Read the latest news.

Millions of people have come out to bid farewell to Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The photograph above, by Arash Khamooshi, shows a crowd on Monday in Tehran, where supporters so packed the route that the truck carrying Khamenei’s coffin could only inch forward.

The Times has annotated details on the photo to help explain the remarkable scene. Click the image above to see.

The mess in Maine

The Senate campaign of Graham Platner, a Maine Democrat, oyster farmer and former Marine combat infantryman who has been running to flip a Republican-held seat, appears close to its end after a series of scandals culminated this week in an accusation of rape.

Democrats high and low — in Maine and across the country — have called for the political neophyte to end his campaign and make room for a different candidate before the Monday deadline for him to withdraw from the ballot.

Even Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of Platner’s earliest and most stalwart supporters, backed away from the candidate yesterday afternoon, saying, “In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside.” The main super PAC for Democrats running for the Senate said it would redirect $24 million in advertising to other states if he remained.

Who could replace him in this critical race to determine control of Congress? Platner, who has denied the allegation that he sexually assaulted a former girlfriend, hasn’t yet stepped aside. But Democrats in Maine are starting to clash over the question as progressive and moderates gear up to pick his successor. It’s unclear how the state party might go about doing so, but options include a pop-up convention or a statewide caucus in late July.

My colleagues who are covering the race in Maine say that several candidates are being discussed, many of them losers in previous races. They include Troy Jackson, a Republican turned progressive who was president of the Maine Senate; Nirav Shah, a moderate who ran Maine’s public health agency; and Shenna Bellows, a former director of the A.C.L.U. of Maine who is now Maine’s secretary of state. You can read about them here.

(One polling firm even floated one of Maine’s most famous sons, the actor Patrick Dempsey. Some 52 percent of voters in its survey regarded McDreamy favorably.)

Progressives, including Platner, want to continue with a progressive candidate. Platner, after all, won the primary over Gov. Janet Mills, a moderate two-term Democrat who withdrew more than a month before the election. “To the Democratic establishment: This is not your opening,” one said.

According to other Democrats, though, the next nominee should not have anything to do with Platner. As a state senator put it on social media on Monday afternoon, “Any connections to Platner will doom that person’s campaign from the very beginning.” An official with the Maine Democratic Party said last night that Platner would have “no role” in the selection process.

To the polls

Just over a week ago, The Times published the results of a poll of likely Maine voters that we conducted with The Portland Press Herald and Siena College. The results showed Platner with a narrow two-point lead over Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a head-to-head challenge for the Senate.

But for the Platner campaign, the poll also suggested that his past — his death’s head tattoo, his history with women — could be suppressing his chances of electoral success. When those surveyed were asked which party they wanted to control the Senate, 54 percent said Democrats, compared with 42 percent who preferred Republicans. That’s a difference of 12 points, not two.

Yesterday I talked to Michael Cooper, our politics editor, about that. Did voters in our poll want a regular-degular Democrat as their Senate candidate, and not someone weighed down by so much baggage?

“That’s a premise that’s going to be tested here,” Coop told me. “As we’re learning in real time, there’s no such thing as a generic Democrat.”

More on Platner’s fall

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Dozens of Americans spoke with Times Opinion about one of the hardest jobs they’ve ever taken on: caring for an aging parent. Click the video above to learn their stories.

What lesson is there from the Graham Platner disaster? Heed the warnings you might not wish to hear, Michelle Goldberg writes.

MORNING READS

Furikake, the Japanese seasoning of dried seaweed and fish mixed with sesame seeds, salt and sugar, is known in my family as “shake.” It’s excellent sprinkled over rice, but it’s also a brilliant partner in this egg salad sandwich. Big flavors and loads of umami: soft-cooked eggs folded with mayo, Dijon mustard, pickle juice, minced red onion, chopped dill and a load of shake, with everything nestled into soft, white milk bread, oh my. That’s dinner!

TODAY’S NUMBER

$1 billion

— That is how much damage a single hour of hail over a midsize city can cause, shattering car windshields, denting hoods, cracking shingles and punching holes in the side of homes. “Insurers now flag hail, not tornadoes, as the primary catalyst for the rising cost of living in the American heartland,” writes Judson Jones, who covers weather for us.

ALL YOU CAN EAT

There were around 70 buffets along the Las Vegas Strip back in 2019, when The Las Vegas Sun called them the city’s “regional cuisine.” Now there are only half a dozen. Tejal Rao, one of our restaurant critics, took their measure, sending us some beautiful sentences from the dining room at Bacchanal, in Caesars Palace:

If GLP-1s really are reshaping the national appetite — shrinking it, quieting it — the excesses of the ultimate all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet might seem like an anachronism. But it doesn’t look like the twilight of the buffet when you’re sitting in Bacchanal, feeling the gravity of the 25,000-square-foot dining room shift as a cook refills the crab station with hot Norwegian snow crab legs.

Ekjhalak Hindi