Aurelia Butler

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    Putin Declares One-Day Easter Truce in Ukraine War

    President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said that from Saturday evening through Sunday, he had ordered his forces to “stop all military activity.” Ukraine’s leader said he was trying to “play with people’s lives.”President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered his forces to “stop all military activity” against Ukraine from Saturday evening through Sunday, declaring an “Easter truce” that appeared aimed at showing an impatient Trump administration that Moscow was still open to peace talks.“We will assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example,” Mr. Putin said in a meeting televised on Saturday with his top military commander, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov.Mr. Putin claimed that Kyiv’s response would shed light on Ukraine’s “desire, and, indeed, its ability” to take part in negotiations to end the war.In a post on social media an hour after Mr. Putin’s announcement, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine referred to it as Mr. Putin’s “next attempt to play with people’s lives.” Mr. Zelensky did not specify whether Ukraine would also observe a truce.Air-raid sirens rang out in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, around 5 p.m. local time, an hour before Mr. Putin’s cease-fire was due to start.“Ukrainian air defense and aviation have already begun working to defend themselves,” Mr. Zelensky said. Referring to Iranian-designed Russian drones, he went on: “Russian ‘Shaheds’ in our skies are Putin’s true attitude to Easter and to people’s lives.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Can Trump Really Negotiate Peace in Ukraine, Russians Wonder

    Many thought President Trump would be able to finish the war. Now they are not so sure.Many Russians cheered President Trump’s election because they thought he could make a deal for a negotiated peace in Ukraine that would satisfy the Kremlin.Three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the disappointment in Moscow is palpable.In interviews, people in the Kremlin’s orbit have revealed frustration both with Mr. Trump’s whirlwind approach to the talks and with President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparent inflexibility in the negotiations. With Mr. Trump and his top diplomat warning on Friday that the United States could walk away from the discussion, some of them fear that a collapse in talks could lead to a further escalation of the fighting.Movement toward peace is going “much more slowly than it should be, and not the way one would want it to be,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a liberal politician in Moscow who held a rare meeting with Mr. Putin in 2023 to urge a cease-fire. In the meantime, he said, Mr. Putin “is just fighting, he’s seizing the moment. He wants to achieve the maximum before substantive talks.”The question now is whether Mr. Putin climbs down from demands that seem little changed from the cease-fire conditions he outlined last summer, when he said Ukraine would have to agree not to join NATO and also withdraw from a large swath of territory before Russia stopped fighting.For now, the increasingly blunt warnings from Mr. Trump and his lieutenants that they could run out of patience have had little effect. Mr. Putin has not budged from his rejection of a monthlong cease-fire that Ukraine agreed to in March.On Saturday, Mr. Putin declared a one-day “Easter truce,” a tactic that appeared aimed at showing that Russia was still interested in peace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Israeli Attacks Kill Dozens in Gaza, Health Ministry Says

    Israel was keeping up its intense bombing campaign in the enclave, which has exacted a heavy price on civilians struggling to find safe places to shelter.The latest round of Israeli attacks in a renewed military offensive in Gaza has killed dozens of Palestinians, the territory’s health ministry said on Saturday.The ministry said that 92 dead and 219 wounded people had arrived at hospitals over the past 48 hours. Gaza health officials do not differentiate between civilians and combatants in casualty counts.Since the collapse last month of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s military has embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in Gaza. Israeli officials have said that the military is targeting militants and weapons infrastructure in a bid to compel Hamas to release more hostages held in the enclave.More than 1,700 people have been killed in Gaza since the cease-fire fell apart, and more than 51,000 people have been killed since the war began in October 2023, according to the health ministry.Israel’s renewed offensive has exacted a heavy price on civilians struggling to find places to shelter and reinforced a feeling among Palestinians in Gaza that nowhere is safe.On Friday, the Israeli military told The New York Times that Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastal land in southern Gaza, was no longer considered a “humanitarian zone.” Earlier in the war, the Israeli military repeatedly instructed Palestinians to go to Mawasi, which it had described at the time as a “humanitarian zone.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Former Trump Staff Members Liken His Actions to Those of ‘Royal Despot’

    A number of prominent Republicans, including several former members of the first Trump administration, have signed an open letter decrying the president for using his power to punish two former administration officials who criticized him, likening his actions to those of a “royal despot.”“For a president to personally and publicly direct the levers of the federal government against publicly named citizens for political reasons sets a new and perilous precedent in our republic,” the group wrote. “No matter one’s party or politics, every American should reject the notion that the awesome power of the presidency can be used to pursue individual vendettas.”Earlier this month, Mr. Trump issued two executive orders revoking the security clearances of Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under during Mr. Trump’s first term and rebutted his claims that the 2020 election had been rigged and stolen, and Miles Taylor, who once served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Taylor anonymously wrote a New York Times opinion essay in 2018 accusing Mr. Trump of rampant “amorality” and telling of an internal government “resistance.”Mr. Trump’s executive orders also revoked the security clearances of people and institutions affiliated with Mr. Krebs and Mr. Taylor, and called for investigations into their government tenures. The letter, signed by more than 200 people, criticized those actions as part of a “profoundly unconstitutional break” with precedent.“Behavior of this kind is more to be expected from a royal despot than the elected leader of a constitutional republic,” the signers wrote. “This is the path of autocracy, not democracy.”The letter’s signatories include Ty Cobb, a lawyer who led Mr. Trump’s response to a special counsel’s investigation of his ties to Russia during its early phases, and John Mitnick, who served as general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired in 2019 after clashing with the White House.Mr. Cobb and Mr. Mitnick, like many of the other Republicans on the list of signatories, have been openly critical of Mr. Trump since parting ways with his administration.The letter was spearheaded by the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group run by Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served on the staff of the first team of House Democrats that worked to impeach Mr. Trump in 2019. More

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    2 Memoirs by Rock ’n’ Roll Muses Who Were So Much More

    Marianne Faithfull was a star in her own right; Peggy Caserta was a hippie tastemaker. Their memoirs are riveting.Marianne Faithfull on the set of “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” in 1968.Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear readers,This week’s authors have a good deal in common. Both women were fetishized for their looks, entangled romantically with musical superstars, situated at the epicenter of 1960s culture, veterans of yearslong heroin addictions. And both were profoundly underestimated.In their memoirs, both also divulge a preposterous amount of glamorous detail. But that’s not what makes these books remarkable. Every addiction story comes with a proof of fire testing. The best ones speak frankly, without euphemism or hosanna, and both of these make the cut.When you consider that the authors spent years chasing a numbed, obliterated existence, their books are all the more meaningful for their clarity of feeling, vision and memory. Thank goodness they were paying attention all those decades ago. Thank God they made it out alive.—Joumana“Faithfull: An Autobiography,” by Marianne Faithfull with David DaltonNonfiction, 1994We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction

    Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Brace Yourself. Trump’s Trade War With China Will Get Even Uglier.

    Voters elected Donald Trump in part because they wanted a fighter. But increasingly it seems that in international trade, he’s good at shaking his fist for the cameras but utterly outclassed when he steps into the boxing ring.Indeed, Trump may be more dangerous to his own side of a trade war than to the other guy.Even after Trump’s climb-down — declaring a 90-day pause on many of the “Liberation Day” levies that sent the stock market reeling — America’s tariff rates remain the highest in more than 90 years. They amount to an enormous tax hike on consumers, with researchers previously estimating that they might add something like $1,700 in costs per year to a middle-income American family. They’re a reason many economists fear that the United States is slipping into a recession.The most heated trade war is with China, and it’s there that I fear Trump has particularly miscalculated. He seems to be waiting for President Xi Jinping to cry uncle and demand relief, but that’s unlikely; instead, it may be the United States that will be most desperate to end the trade conflict.China does have serious internal economic challenges, including widespread underemployment and a deflationary loop with no end in sight. The trade war could cost China millions of jobs, and that raises some risks of political instability.Yet it’s also true that China has prepared for this trade war. I’m guessing some Chinese factories are already printing “Made in Vietnam” labels and preparing to ship goods through third countries. And China will fight with weapons that go far beyond tariffs.China buys agricultural products and airplanes from America, and it can almost certainly get what it needs elsewhere. But where is the United States going to get rare-earth minerals, essential for American industry and the military-industrial base?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Just Scrapped My Anti-Kremlin Streaming Platform, Votvot

    The Trump administration’s decision to take a hammer to the funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty might be legally dubious, but politically pretty safe: Its programming wasn’t intended to reach American audiences, so who would miss it, really?In September 2022, I came to Prague, in an unusual role of a volunteer media expert, to observe the operations of the Russian-language TV channel and online news portal, Current Time — one of the many brands under the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty umbrella. An American from Latvia whose native language is Russian, I had spent much of the previous decade trying to build bridges between the U.S. and Russian TV industries, a dream wiped out overnight with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine earlier that year. Current Time had become an indispensable source of news for an audience misled by their own state media. Six months in, war coverage had pushed out almost all other reporting and fatigue was setting in. I wanted to be useful. If my knowledge of the Russian media could somehow help Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I was happy to share it.Not to mention the fact that, as a lifelong fan of the band R.E.M., I’d never pass up a chance to visit the organization that helped inspire their debut single, “Radio Free Europe.”The organization’s headquarters was an imposing gray cube, just east of the city center. The general aura reminded me of a U.S. Embassy. It might be an editorially independent nongovernment entity, but its cultural and literal footprint was always that of an American values bulwark.I soon found I had landed in the middle of a philosophical debate. Would showing anything other than atrocities constitute catering to Russia? At the time of my arrival, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty staff was considering starting a second channel that would run hard-hitting documentaries about Russian history and cruelties. I wondered who would be the audience for such depressing programming. A better tactic, I thought, would be to try to appeal to the persuadables, an audience many of whom had tuned out watching the news but retained a sense of right and wrong; an audience that Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, had sacrificed his freedom — and, soon, his life — trying to reach.The walls of the headquarters were lined not only with photos of the likes of Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton, but also Duke Ellington and Tom Jones. Indeed, the older generation of Soviet citizens retained warm memories of the “enemy voices” (as Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and the BBC’s Russian Service were known) not because they delivered news from the West, but because they’d play jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Pop culture was the draw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More