Elections

While the viability of the plan was not immediately clear, officials said it was a reminder that the Kremlin remained determined to bring down President Volodymyr Zelensky.Ukraine’s security service said on Monday that it had foiled yet another Russian plot to stir public unrest and then use the ensuing turmoil to topple the government, outlining a familiar tactic that Kyiv claims has been employed in string of coup attempts in recent years.The Ukrainian domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U., said that it had discovered a “group” of conspirators it accused of planning to spark a riot, seize the Parliament building and replace the nation’s military and civilian leadership. Four people have been arrested and charged, according to the authorities.While offering little detail on how such an ambitious plan could have succeeded, officials said it was a reminder that more than two years after launching a full-scale invasion of the country, the Kremlin remained determined to bring down President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government by any means.On the battlefield, Russia continues to send tens of thousands of new soldiers to the front to replace those killed in the hopes of exhausting Ukraine’s military and Kyiv’s Western backers. At the same time, Russia’s relentless bombardment of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure is designed, in part, to throttle the economy and undermine the state’s ability to function.The Kremlin has also long been directing more covert campaigns aimed at destabilizing the government in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western officials, in some cases attempting to stir discontent with disinformation.The plot outlined by Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and prosecutors on Monday fit squarely in that pattern.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

Regulators said the subscription service introduced last year is a “pay or consent” method to collect personal data and bolster advertising.When Meta introduced a subscription option last year that would allow users in the European Union to pay for an advertising-free experience of Instagram and Facebook, it was meant to fix regulatory problems the company faced in the region.The plan created new legal headaches instead.On Monday, European Union regulators said Meta’s subscription, which costs up to 12.99 euros a month, amounted to a “pay or consent” scheme that required users to choose between paying a fee or handing over more personal data to Meta to use for targeted advertising.Meta introduced the subscription last year as a way to address regulatory and legal scrutiny of its advertising-based business model. Of most concern was the company’s combination of data collected about users across its different platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — along with information pulled from other websites and apps.Meta argued that by offering a subscription, users had a fair alternative.But regulators on Monday said the system was no choice at all, forcing users to pay for privacy. The authorities said Meta’s policy violated the Digital Markets Act, a new law aimed at reining in the power of the biggest tech companies.The law, known as the D.M.A., is intended to prevent large tech companies from using their size to coerce users into accepting terms of service they would otherwise reject, including the collection of personal data. The concern was platforms like Instagram and Facebook are so widely used that people have to choose to either hand over their data or not join at all.Regulators said the law required companies to allow users to opt out of having their personal data collected while still getting a “less personalized but equivalent alternative” of the service.“Meta’s ‘pay or consent’ business model is in breach of the D.M.A.,” said Thierry Breton, the European commissioner who helped draft the law. “The D.M.A. is there to give back to the users the power to decide how their data is used and ensure innovative companies can compete on equal footing with tech giants on data access.”In a statement, Meta said that the subscription service complied with the Digital Markets Act and that it would work with European regulators to resolve the investigation.Last week, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president, said that Europe was falling behind economically because of overregulation. “Europe’s regulatory complexity and the patchwork of laws across different member states often makes companies hesitant to roll out new products here,” he said.The announcement on Monday is one step in a longer process. The European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation bloc, has until March to complete its investigation. If found guilty, Meta could face fines of up to 10 percent of its global revenue and up to 20 percent for repeat offenses.Meta is the second company to face charges under the Digital Markets Act. Last week, the commission brought charges against Apple for unfair business practices related to the App Store. More

The first woman to serve as the paper’s national editor, she focused on issues of race, class and poverty in rising to assistant managing editor.Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story ideas — they flew out of her in all directions — and whose journalistic passions were poverty, race and class, which led to reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death, in the palliative care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, came after breast cancer had spread to other organs, her husband, William A. Behr, said.Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe led to a lifetime interest in issues around inequality, was instrumental in overseeing several major series for The Times that examined class and racial divides. Each enlisted squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments.“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would become the Times’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the conventional wisdom that the country at the turn of the 21st century had become “post racial.” Its deep dives into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.Another series, “Class in America,” was an examination in 2005 of how social class, often unspoken, produced glaring imbalances in society.Earlier, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part series in 1993, “Children of the Shadows,” which pushed past stereotypes of young people in inner cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer in feature writing for her searing portrait in the series of a 10-year-old boy caring for four siblings.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

A measure seeking to protect abortion access in the State Constitution will appear on the ballot. It is one of nearly a dozen such initiatives that could shape other races this election. Nevada residents will vote on whether to protect the right to abortion in the state this November, as abortion rights groups try to continue their winning streak with measures that put the issue directly before voters. The Nevada secretary of state’s office certified on Friday the ballot initiative to amend the State Constitution to include an explicit right to abortion after verifying the signatures required. The group behind the measure, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, submitted 200,000 signatures in May, nearly 100,000 more than needed. The secretary of state’s office told the group that it had verified just under 128,000 signatures.Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped the constitutional right to abortion, 18 Republican-controlled states have banned the procedure in almost all circumstances or prohibited it after six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. At least a dozen states, most of them led by Democrats, have passed new protections to abortion since the decision.The ruling has sparked a movement among abortion rights supporters to enshrine the right to the procedure in state constitutions through ballot measures. They have been successful in putting them on the ballot in at least five other states this year: Florida, Colorado, New York, Maryland and South Dakota. Similar initiatives are also underway in states like Arizona, Arkansas and Nebraska — which all face deadlines to submit signatures this week — and come November, voters in as many as 11 states could get a chance to weigh in.In Nevada, abortion is legal through 24 weeks of pregnancy. But organizers of the ballot initiative are seeking to amend the State Constitution to protect abortion up to the point of fetal viability — also around 24 weeks — because it is harder to change the Constitution than repeal state law.“We can’t take anything for granted,” said Lindsey Harmon, president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom. “We know Nevada has always been overwhelmingly pro-choice, and there’s no reason it should not be in the Constitution.”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

“He has an energy that’s fun to hate,” the British actor said of his swaggering vampire character in AMC’s series-length Anne Rice adaptation.This interview contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “Interview With the Vampire.”Until his time in AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire” was cut short — along with his head — in the Season 2 finale, Santiago was the toast of the vampiric theater scene.Played by the British actor Ben Daniels, himself an Olivier Award-winning veteran of the stage, Santiago was a dashing and devilish performer at the Théâtre des Vampires, in postwar Paris. Formerly known as Francis, a failed English actor, Santiago transformed himself into an underworld dandy after becoming a bloodsucker — and took a cooler-sounding name — rarely seen without a vampiress on each arm and a theatrically hateful twinkle in his eye.“He’s so awful and delicious at the same time!” Daniels said in a video interview last week. “And it’s his relish of it as well, his glee. He just loves being a vampire.”Daniels added: “He has an energy that’s fun to hate.”Unfortunately for Santiago, the show’s title vampire was his hater-in-chief. Over the course of Season 2, which concluded on Sunday, Santiago seized control of the theater troupe, which turned out to be a coven of vampires in disguise. At the season’s climax, Santiago staged a mock trial that ended with the real execution-by-sunlight of Claudia (Delainey Hayles) and her companion, Madeleine (Roxane Duran). It was for this crime that Santiago lost his head to their father figure, the vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson), in the finale.Based on the novels of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, the AMC show, created and overseen by Rolin Jones, has already been renewed for a third season. But Daniels doesn’t feel too bad that his character won’t live to see Season 3. Santiago had it coming given his bad behavior — particularly by the end.“If you didn’t want him dead before,” Daniels said, “you certainly do then.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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

Rhaenyra acts on a risky hope that cooler heads might prevail. But are there really any cool heads left?Season 2, Episode 3:“We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think,” George R.R. Martin wrote in his short 1996 essay “On Fantasy.” “To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang.” By that standard, this week’s episode of “House of the Dragon,” a series based on Martin’s book “Fire and Blood,” is spicy fantasy indeed.I don’t just mean the sex and nudity, though what there was of both blew my hair back on my head. For Martin, fantasy is about more than ribaldry. Describing it as a genre of “silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli,” he goes on to write of how its very largeness, the unbounded scope of its imagination, “speaks to something deep within us.” This episode certainly spoke to something deep within this critic.Crumbling gothic castles and grotesque charnel-house battlefields, nightmares of murder and desperate pleas for peace, breakneck dragon chases and it-was-all-a-big-misunderstandings — this week offered the kind of maximalist storytelling that felt both over-the-top and vital. (Indeed it’s hard to have great TV without at least a smidgen of the outlandish.) From a story perspective, the episode’s biggest moment arrived right near the end. The brewing war between the Blacks and the Greens over the Iron Throne comes down to the wishes of one dead man, King Viserys. For years, he proclaimed his daughter, Rhaenyra, to be his heir to all and sundry. But on the night it most counted, the night of his death, he told his wife, Queen Alicent, that his eldest son, Aegon, must be the one to unite the realm — “The Prince That Was Promised,” as Viserys called the callow lad.Or so it seemed to Alicent. We in the audience knew that when he mentioned the name Aegon, he was referring to his prophetic ancestor, Aegon the Conqueror, and to Aegon’s vision of an apocalyptic battle against the darkness, as depicted in the final season of “Game of Thrones.”Did Alicent truly believe that Viserys was talking about their son? Or was that merely what she wished to believe? (As important, should a drama hinge its central conflict on the kind of verbal mix-up better suited to a sitcom? Answering that is, at this advanced stage, perhaps beyond the scope of this recap.)The daring stealth mission in which Rhaenyra sneaks back into King’s Landing (with Mysaria’s help) to force a one-on-one meeting with her frenemy of frenemies clears all this up. Alicent really believes Viserys wanted Aegon. For her part, Rhaenyra really believes Alicent really believes it. But once the dowager queen mentions the Conqueror’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” Rhaenyra figures out what went wrong and offers a clarification … which Alicent refuses to heed, although she seems to knows in her heart that it is true.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

She developed one of the first modern intensive care units for premature babies, helping newborns to breathe with lifesaving new treatments.Dr. Mildred Thornton Stahlman, a Vanderbilt University pediatrician whose research on fatal lung disease in newborns led to lifesaving treatments and to the creation, in 1961, of one of the first neonatal intensive care units, died on Saturday at her home in Brentwood, Tenn. She was 101.Her death was confirmed by Eva Hill, the wife of Dr. Stahlman’s nephew George Hill.On Oct. 31, 1961, Dr. Stahlman fitted a premature baby who was gasping for breath into a miniature iron lung machine, also known as a negative pressure ventilator, the kind used for children with polio. The machine worked by pulling the baby’s frail chest muscles open to help draw in air. The baby survived.That initial success, along with findings from Dr. Stahlman’s studies on newborn lambs, helped launch a new era of treating respiratory lung disease, a leading killer of premature babies. Immature lungs lack surfactant, a soapy chemical that coats air sacs. Without surfactant, the tiny sacs collapse.Shortly after her first success, Dr. Stahlman reported that, by 1965, she had used the iron lung machine, augmented with positive pressure, to save 11 of 26 babies at Vanderbilt. By the 1970s, negative pressure tanks were jettisoned for positive pressure machines that worked by inflating the lungs. In the 1990s, the use of surfactants extracted from animal lungs dramatically improved the survival of babies with severe disease who required mechanical ventilation. “Millie was one of the first to push the limits of viability of premature infants in a careful and scientific way,” said Dr. Linda Mayes, a Yale professor of child psychiatry, pediatrics and psychology and chair of the Yale Child Study Center who trained under Dr. Stahlman. “She was a physician-scientist long before that phrase was popular.”In the early days of neonatology, Dr. Stahlman was one of the few doctors in the world who knew how to thread tiny catheters into the umbilical vessels of newborns to monitor blood oxygen, wrote Sarah DiGregorio in her book, “Early: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What It Teaches Us about Being Human.” The procedure was vital to ensuring enough oxygen to keep the babies alive but not so much that it might trigger blindness.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

An officer in Utica, N.Y., fatally shot the boy, Nyah Mway, after he brandished what the officer believed was a gun. At a community meeting, residents called the killing “an injustice.”More than 100 residents of Utica, N.Y., grieving the death of a 13-year-old boy who was fatally shot by a police officer there last week, gathered at a church on Sunday afternoon to demand accountability for his killing.The boy, Nyah Mway, was walking in the city with another boy on Friday night when they were stopped by three police officers. When one officer asked to pat them down, Nyah fled, footage from officers’ body-worn cameras shows.The police said in a statement that Nyah had displayed “what appeared to be a handgun” as he ran. In footage that has been slowed down, it appears that he turns while holding something that looks like a handgun, before he is tackled, held to the ground and shot.The police later determined that he had been holding a pellet gun.On Sunday, the mayor of Utica, Michael P. Galime, answered questions from residents who filled the auditorium at Tabernacle Baptist Church. Police officials were not in attendance.Almost all of the attendees were part of the city’s Karen community — members of an ethnic group from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, who speak the Karen language. Nyah’s family members are Karen refugees.In Utica, a city of about 60,000, refugees and their families make up about a quarter of the population.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