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      ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Florence Pugh and Pals Kick Some Asterisk

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      The actress is the main attraction in Marvel’s latest, about a group of ragtag super-types who join forces to (spoiler alert!) save the world.For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.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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      Judge Rejects Efforts to Free F.B.I. Informant Who Lied About Hunter Biden

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      The Trump administration had signaled it might try to undo the guilty plea and six-year prison sentence for Alexander Smirnov.A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a bid by the Justice Department to free a former F.B.I. informant who had pleaded guilty to lying about Hunter Biden and evading his taxes, saying that nothing about the facts of the case had changed and the man might still flee if released.The longtime informant, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty in December in exchange for a six-year prison sentence, admitting that he had lied to the government when he claimed to have information about a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter.Before Mr. Smirnov was charged and eventually admitted his guilt, Republican lawmakers had promoted his false claims about the Bidens in their push to try to impeach President Biden. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Smirnov’s allegations were also amplified by the Trump supporter Kash Patel, who is now the director of the F.B.I.Then, in an abrupt reversal this month, the Justice Department that had sent Mr. Smirnov to prison filed court papers seeking to have him released early, saying it was taking a second look at the case. That request was filed under instructions from senior Justice Department officials in Washington, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a U.S. District Court judge, Otis D. Wright II, rejected that request, saying neither prosecutors nor Mr. Smirnov’s lawyers had presented any evidence that Mr. Smirnov was any less of a flight risk than when he was arrested. The judge also pushed back on what he said were inaccurate claims by the lawyers about the precise terms of his plea deal.The parties in the case, the judge wrote, “present no new facts in their papers that would alter the court’s conclusion that Smirnov is a flight risk, let alone provide ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that he is not one.”The Smirnov case was an offshoot of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, and the plea deal was negotiated by David C. Weiss, the special counsel who led the inquiry and then stepped down in January.During the Biden administration, the Justice Department argued against the release of Mr. Smirnov, who had been arrested at the Las Vegas airport after returning to the United States from overseas.In the department’s filing earlier this month, prosecutors said that “clear and convincing evidence for defendant’s nonviolent offenses of conviction shows that defendant is not likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of any other person.”The judge’s order said that the government’s new argument was unconvincing, writing that “the fact remains that Smirnov has been convicted and sentenced to 72 months in prison, providing ample incentive to flee.” More

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      Trump Tariffs and Shrinking GDP Raise Political Stakes

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      The report that the economy contracted in the first quarter underscored how much President Trump has at risk as he pursues an aggressive trade war.President Trump took office 101 days ago after a campaign in which voters bought his argument that he could skillfully manage the economy and that his policy prescriptions could both bolster growth and eradicate inflation.So the news on Wednesday that the nation’s gross domestic product had contracted in the first three months of the year was a sharp political jolt as well as a blinking economic warning.It came at the end of a quarter in which stock prices were down sharply, Wall Street’s worst performance at the start of a new presidential term since Gerald R. Ford tried to steer the country out of scandal and inflation 51 years ago. And it only added to the widespread uncertainty among businesses and consumers about what the rest of the year might hold as Mr. Trump pursues a trade war that is already choking off supply chains and threatening to push prices up and lead to shortages of critical components and products on shelves.It is too soon to predict where the American economy is headed for the rest of the year, and Mr. Trump remains insistent that he will produce a flurry of trade deals that will bring manufacturing back to the United States and usher in a new age of prosperity.But the first-quarter figures brought the political risks for him into focus. For Mr. Trump, what is at stake is a question of fundamental competence on an issue that he has always used to define himself.If the report proves to be a harbinger of an extended slowdown or recession, the situation could become the economic analog of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago this summer. Mr. Biden’s job approval ratings never recovered from that early debacle. Nothing he did later — not the millions of jobs created, not the big legislative victories, not the rapid response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — could restore the sense among voters that he could be trusted to carry out the job with the skill they assumed he brought to it.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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      Senate Rejects Bipartisan Measure to Undo Trump’s Tariffs

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      Only three Republicans joined Democrats in voting to end the national emergency President Trump declared to impose tariffs on most U.S. trading partners, leaving the measure short of the support needed to pass.The Senate on Wednesday rejected an effort to undo President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on most U.S. trading partners, even as a small group of Republicans joined Democrats in delivering a rebuke to a trade policy that many lawmakers fear is causing economic harm.The vote deadlocked at 49 to 49, meaning it failed despite three Republicans joining Democrats in favor of a measure that sought to terminate the national emergency declaration Mr. Trump used this month to impose 10 percent reciprocal tariffs.Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and a cosponsor of the resolution, crossed party lines to support it, as well as Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. But the defections were not enough to make up for the absences of two supporters: Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who backed a similar measure this month.“It’s still a debate worth having,” Mr. Paul said of the failed resolution. He noted that many of his Republican colleagues are privately expressing consternation over Mr. Trump’s trade war but have carefully calibrated their public responses to defer to the president.A subsequent procedural vote on the measure prompted Vice President JD Vance to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday evening to cast the deciding vote to table it, formally ending the effort to challenge Mr. Trump’s use of the emergency power for wide-ranging tariffs.Even if the resolution had passed the Senate, it had no path to enactment. The White House has threatened a veto, and House Republican leaders moved pre-emptively to prevent any such measure from being forced to the floor until the fall at the earliest. The maneuver was aimed at shielding their members from politically tricky votes on the matter.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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      Truck Overturns, and Millions of Dimes Spill Onto Texas Highway

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      Road lanes were closed for about 14 hours while crews used vacuums, shovels and their hands to scoop up freshly minted loose coins.The scene looked as if a giant piggy bank had been split open, its loose change scattering and forming a metallic sea.In fact, it was the aftermath of an accident in which an 18-wheeler had rolled onto its side a little over an hour before sunrise on Tuesday on U.S. Route 287 in Alvord, Texas, a town about 50 miles north of Fort Worth.What had spilled out was part of a load of eight million dimes, Sgt. Josue De La Cerda of the Texas Department of Public Safety said on Wednesday.The truck was carrying the freshly minted coins for the U.S. Mint, according to the Wise County E.M.S. Rescue, which responded to the rollover at 5:15 a.m. The driver and the passenger suffered injuries that were not life-threatening and were later released from a hospital, officials said. There were no other injuries.It took about 14 hours before the southbound lanes of the highway reopened.In that time, cleanup crews used heavy-duty vacuum trucks to suck up the loose coins that had spilled onto the two lanes of highway. Other workers used shovels and their bare hands to scoop up piles of dirt to collect the dimes that scattered off the roadway.“The funniest part to me was that they picked up the dimes using the vacuum trucks that are used to suck out sewage and water and stuff like that,” said Mayor Caleb Caviness of Alvord.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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      David Horowitz, Leftist Turned Trump Defender, Is Dead at 86

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      Once a Marxist, he came to embrace hard-right positions, including the falsehood that Mr. Trump won in 2020, and to mentor Stephen Miller, later the Trump adviser.David Horowitz, a radical leftist of the 1960s who did a political about-face to become an outspoken conservative author and activist, writing that Barack Obama had “betrayed” America, and an ardent cheerleader for Donald J. Trump, died on Tuesday. He was 86.The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a think tank he founded in Southern California, said the cause was cancer. His wife, April Horowitz, said he died at his home in Colorado.Once a self-described Marxist, Mr. Horowitz executed a dizzying transit from the extreme left to the extreme right. He argued that the Black Lives Matter movement had fueled racial hatred; he opposed Palestinian rights; he denounced the news media and universities as tools of the left; and he falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, which Mr. Horowitz called “the greatest political crime” in American history.A prolific author since his early 20s, Mr. Horowitz published several pro-Trump books, including “Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America” (2017) and “The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America” (2021). The enemies he accused of totalitarian impulses were the mainstream Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, and Kamala Harris, then the vice president.Mr. Horowitz was a mentor to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, whom he met when Mr. Miller was a California high school student fervidly critical of multiculturalism.At Duke University, Mr. Miller started a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a grass-roots advocacy group founded by Mr. Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz asked him to help coordinate an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses, according to Jean Guerrero, a biographer of Mr. Miller, writing in Politico in 2020.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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      Elise Stefanik, Cabinet Hopes Dashed, Considers Her Next Move

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      Styrofoam packing peanuts littered an empty office in the Rayburn House Office Building across from the Capitol on Monday morning as two moving men unpacked a plush couch, an upholstered armchair, lamps and a lucite side table.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York was back.This had not been the plan.Ms. Stefanik, the self-proclaimed “ultra MAGA” warrior whom President Trump nominated to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, had expected to sail through her Senate confirmation vote, which was to be scheduled in early April.So she boxed up her office. She sent off her longtime chief of staff, Patrick Hester, to start a new job at the State Department, where he ended up working for seven days. She completed a “farewell tour” of her district, checked out schools for her son in New York City and was looking forward to moving into the $15 million Manhattan penthouse that comes with what is considered a fairly cushy job.Instead, Ms. Stefanik was back here on Capitol Hill amid the peanuts, contemplating her next steps and pinning most of the blame for what happened on Speaker Mike Johnson.To detractors, the president’s decision to pull Ms. Stefanik’s nomination was something akin to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who was elected as a moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right, coming to personify the opportunistic shape-shifting that has gripped her party in the age of Mr. Trump.Ms. Stefanik’s plight seemed to crystallize in one succinct cautionary tale the limits of loyalty in the MAGA universe. Even one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, an effective ally since his first impeachment trial, ultimately did not get what she had long been promised.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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      Under Trump, Stocks Have the Worst Start to a Presidential Term Since 1974

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      During the first 100 days of the Trump administration, shock waves from the chaotic tariff rollout continue to send tremors through the global financial system.One hundred days of President Trump. Seventy days of whipsaw trading in financial markets. Thirty three days of losses. More than $6.5 trillion wiped from the value of public companies.For financial markets, the 9 percent drop in the S&P 500 is on track for the worst start to a presidential term since Gerald R. Ford took over from Richard M. Nixon in August 1974 after the Watergate scandal. The slump is worse even than when the tech bubble burst at the turn of the century, and George W. Bush inherited a market already in free fall.In contrast, Mr. Trump inherited an economy on solid footing and a stock market rising from one record high to another.That swiftly changed when Mr. Trump unveiled his marquee suite of tariffs on April 2 — not the first new import taxes announced by his administration, but by far the most sweeping. Volatility erupted. Wall Street frantically began to grapple with the economic consequences of the new government’s policies.The S&P 500 tumbled more than 10 percent in two days, a drop comparable to some of the worst days of the pandemic-induced sell-off in March 2020 and, before that, the financial crisis in 2008.Stocks have since stabilized, but the shock waves from the chaotic tariff rollout continue to send tremors through the global financial system.Trump’s Astonishing 100 Days, in 8 ChartsBy many measures, the opening months of President Trump’s second term stand apart from those of essentially any modern president.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