Elections

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has been on a self-appointed diplomatic mission that aligns with Donald J. Trump’s preferences in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.After meeting with Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home on Thursday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary wrote to a top E.U. official to say that Mr. Trump had told him he was planning a swift push for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.Mr. Trump’s view, the letter explained, was that the war had to end, and that he had specific plans to broker this outcome quickly, even before being inaugurated, if he were elected.While it was not possible to independently verify Mr. Orban’s account, the positions laid out in the letter, obtained by The New York Times, largely track with Mr. Trump’s long-held views on Ukraine. It did not offer details about how Mr. Trump would end the intractable war, now in its third year, other than to indicate that he would reduce American financial support for Ukraine.Mr. Orban is closely aligned with Mr. Trump and is the fiercest critic-from-within of the European Union’s staunch backing of Ukraine.Mr. Orban Goes to FloridaMr. Orban was in Washington to attend the NATO summit and took time out to see Mr. Trump in Florida. The meeting capped a frantic two weeks of self-appointed diplomacy by Mr. Orban after his country took on the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union on July 1.Mr. Orban has used the largely secretarial role to bounce around the world. He visited President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow; President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine; and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing. He then met with Mr. Trump, who during his campaign has sat down with a series of foreign officials aligned with his views.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

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California told attendees at a Democratic fund-raiser that the party would lose the Senate and miss a chance to take the House if the president did not drop out.Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is running for Senate, warned during a private meeting with donors on Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses in November if President Biden remained at the top of the ticket, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Schiff’s remarks at the meeting.If Mr. Biden remained, not only would he lose to former President Donald J. Trump, he could be enough of a drag on other Democratic candidates that the party would most likely lose the Senate and miss an opportunity to win control of the House, Mr. Schiff said at a fund-raiser in New York.“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Mr. Schiff said during the meeting, according to a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”Mr. Schiff’s remarks underscore the depth of the concerns in the president’s party about the prospects for downballot Democrats if Mr. Biden remains in the race, even if most senior Democrats are still unwilling to express such dire warnings in public.The event was held in East Hampton, N.Y., shortly before Mr. Trump was shot on Saturday. Public calls from Democrats for Mr. Biden to step aside as a candidate have dropped off since the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life, providing Mr. Biden, who is insisting the he will remain in the race, an opportunity to overcome the dissent.In an effort to end the internal battle, leaders of the Democratic National Committee are moving to formally nominate Mr. Biden as the party’s candidate by the end of the month, weeks before their convention in Chicago in August.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

Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.He amended his statement.“Especially poets,” he added.To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”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

“The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist,” part of Lincoln Center’s summer festival, aims to shine light on police violence in the United States.In the middle of “The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist,” an opera about the police killing of Eric Garner, a singer portraying his daughter reflects on his famous final words: “I can’t breathe.”“I can’t let go,” she sings. “I hear his words again and again. A scream in a dream that escapes as a gasp.”A decade after Garner’s death, “Ritual of Breath,” which comes to Lincoln Center’s summer festival on Friday, aims to shine light on Garner’s legacy and the broader problem of police violence in the United States.The opera, composed by Jonathan Berger to a libretto by the poet Vievee Francis, focuses on Garner’s daughter, Erica, as she grapples with the pain, guilt and anger she feels over her father’s death. But “Ritual of Breath” also spotlights the stories of other Black people killed by the police, and issues a spirited call for empathy and change from performers including a 90-member choir spread across the stage and in the audience.“It’s not enough to say that someone died on the street — to reduce them to a chalk outline,” Francis said. “If we don’t know who that was, if we don’t see them as human, no difference will be made. Art allows us to feel that life.”The creators of “Ritual of Breath,” which premiered in 2022, hope that the opera will bring fresh attention to social injustice in American society. Niegel Smith, the show’s director, quoted a line from the opera’s final scene in explaining its message: “When a brother’s breath fails, we pick it up. When a sister’s breath fails, we pick it up.”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

Mr. Wright was known for his immersive journalism that focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage to explore the nooks and crannies of American life.Evan Wright, an award-winning journalist whose reporting from the Iraq War formed the best-selling book “Generation Kill” and whose work illuminated the lives of those on the fringes of society, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office and was confirmed in a statement released Monday night by his family.Mr. Wright was known for his immersive journalism that often focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage, including traveling with anarchists behind the Battle of Seattle in 1999, covering the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress and riding with the Marines leading the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His reporting on crime, war and American subcultures was published in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, as well as in Hustler, Vanity Fair and Time.“I failed at everything else,” he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2011, discussing what led him to journalism. “I was optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants.”Mr. Wright moved from his native Ohio to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue screenwriting, according to a 2009 Los Angeles Times article. He landed his first paid journalism job in 1995 as an entertainment editor at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and covering the adult film industry. At Rolling Stone Mr. Wright was introduced to combat and military culture, first on assignment in Afghanistan in 2002 embedding with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and then in 2003 with the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. Mr. Wright secured a spot in the lead vehicle in the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, eventually filing a three-part series in Rolling Stone called “The Killer Elite,” which received the 2004 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.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

Pete Wells is moving on from his role as the Times restaurant critic, a job with many rewards and maybe too many courses.Early this year, I went for my first physical in longer than I’d care to admit. At the time, I was about halfway through a list of 140 or so restaurants I planned to visit before I wrote the 2024 edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.” It was a fair bet that I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments. The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.OK, not just technically.I knew I needed to change my life. I promised I’d start just as soon as I’d eaten in the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.But a funny thing happened when I got to the end of all that eating: I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not, at least not the way I used to be. And so, after 12 years as restaurant critic for The New York Times, I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my state of technical obesity will allow.Not that I’m leaving the newsroom. I have a couple more restaurant reviews in my back pocket that will appear over the next few weeks, and I plan to stick around at The Times long after that. But I can’t hack the week-to-week reviewing life anymore.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

The Times’s restaurant critic is stepping down after a dozen years on the job. Here are some of his most engaging reviews and essays.As The New York Times’s restaurant critic for the last dozen years, Pete Wells has reported from the dining-room trenches on a changing industry. When he started the job in late 2011, old-guard restaurants like Le Cirque and the Four Seasons were still humming, with the help of expense-account diners. The #MeToo movement and the pandemic, which reshaped restaurant kitchens, were years away.Pete has explored the five boroughs and far beyond, as the Food desk’s coverage of restaurants widened its scope. He noted the rise in food halls in New York, and the city’s vast wealth of Chinese restaurants. He is on a seemingly endless quest for ceviche. (If you’re curious about his process, listen to him on this episode of “The Daily” and learn why he always packs a notebook.)Here are 21 pieces that show the sweep and depth of his criticism.Pete Wells’s First Starred ReviewWong, ★★, 2012His first column as restaurant critic took him to an Asian fusion restaurant from the chef Simpson Wong, where the duck-fat ice cream and duck-tongue meatballs brought smiles of pleasant surprise.After first reviewing Forever Jerk in 2021, Pete twice put it on his annual list of 100 best restaurants in New York City.Clay Williams for The New York TimesFinding New York’s Hidden GemsForever Jerk, multiple locations, 2021Pete followed the flavor, often to Queens, for long-simmered West African delights, Egyptian specialty sandwiches and roasted cold noodles. To find Forever Jerk, he stalked a smoke trail to a stretch of Flatlands Avenue, where Oneil Reid, the chef and owner, has set up one of three Forever Jerk stands in the city. (Pete gave no stars to restaurants he reviewed during the pandemic. “Formerly,” he told readers, “I tried to make the stars reflect how close any given restaurant came to being an ideal version of itself. But in the pandemic, there were no ideal restaurants, only places that were making it up as they went along.”)A Sri Lankan Favorite on Staten IslandLakruwana, ★, 2013Lakruwana began its life in Times Square, but a fire drove it to Staten Island, where the Sunday buffet has become one of legend. “Lakruwana may be New York’s most elaborate realization of the immigrant restaurateur’s dream: a shrine to another culture that can soothe homesickness in some patrons and kindle a thrilling sense of discovery in others.”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

Chaos at the stadium raised questions about crowd control and security just two years before the U.S. is set to co-host the World Cup in 11 cities.Throngs of fans rushed past security at the final match of the Copa América soccer tournament, some of them brazenly climbing tall fences. A few appeared to try to enter the Hard Rock Stadium near Miami through a ceiling vent. Children cried as the crowds pushed into metal barriers. Some adults grew faint under the broiling sun.The highly anticipated matchup between Argentina and Colombia on Sunday was intended to showcase the best of South American soccer — and serve as a dress rehearsal for the United States to co-host the men’s World Cup in 2026. Instead, it turned into mayhem, delaying kickoff for over an hour as the situation outside the stadium doors grew dangerous.On Monday, tournament organizers, stadium officials and the local authorities struggled to explain exactly what had gone wrong, offering few details about evident organizational failures, pointing fingers and mostly blaming fans who did not have tickets for the match for showing up anyway and becoming “unruly.” Law enforcement officials arrested 27 people and evicted 55 others from the stadium, according to the Miami-Dade County Police Department.Ramón Jesurún, president of the Colombia Soccer Federation, was arrested, along with his son.Carlos Ortega/EPA, via ShutterstockAmong those arrested were Ramón Jesurún, the head of Colombia’s soccer federation, and his son, Ramón Jamil Jesurún. They were charged with battery of a security guard in a stadium tunnel after the match had concluded, with Argentina defeating Colombia, 1-0, in extra time. The younger Mr. Jesurún was also charged with grabbing another stadium employee. Father and son spent the night in the Miami-Dade County jail, public records showed.The chaos caused international embarrassment for organizers of the Copa América, which had already been marred by complaints from players and coaches about the poor quality of the playing surfaces, training facilities and security. After a semifinal match in North Carolina last week, several Uruguayan players jumped into the stands to fight with Colombian fans whom they later said had been threatening the players’ families.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