Elections

An American official said the United States had information undermining Russia’s claim that a device it is developing is for peaceful scientific research.American officials are trying to increase international pressure on Russia not to deploy an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space, and have obtained information that undermines Moscow’s explanation that the device it is developing is for peaceful scientific purposes, a senior State Department official said on Friday.Concern over the Russian development of a new generation of space nuclear weapons has been growing in Washington, especially since Moscow’s veto last month of a U.N. measure aimed at keeping space free of such weapons. Some Republicans believe that the Biden administration is not doing enough to deter Russian work on the device, and others are concerned about China’s apparent decision not to pressure Moscow to stop.On Friday, Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, said that while the United States had been aware of Russia’s pursuit of such a device for years, “only recently have we been able to make a more precise assessment of their progress.”Ms. Stewart, speaking at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the orbit the Russian satellite would occupy is in a high-radiation region not used by other satellites, information that undercuts Russia’s defense that it is not developing a weapon.She condemned Russia’s veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution pushed by the United States and Japan aimed at reaffirming the ban against nuclear weapons being deployed in orbit. She argued that every country should be pushing Russia not to deploy a nuclear-armed satellite.“Everything that we’re doing in the diplomatic arena is working to prevent the Russians from going forward with this program,” she said. “The international response should be outrage if this actually does go forward, because it affects everyone, right? Every single country. It’s indiscriminate in its potential effect.”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 dramatic appearance of Ms. Hicks, once one of Donald J. Trump’s closest aides, riveted the audience. During her testimony, she blinked back tears.In the unceasing reality show that is Donald J. Trump’s life, his Manhattan criminal trial has functioned as something of a reunion episode, where supporting players return to confront the protagonist and relive memorable moments from seasons past. On Friday, the audience in the courtroom tensed when prosecutors announced the next person to testify on their behalf: Hope Hicks.She was not a surprise witness. But this felt like a very special guest.Ms. Hicks’s role in the Trump Show dates to 2015, when, as a 26-year-old with no political experience, she was plucked from Ivanka Trump’s clothing line to serve as press secretary to what then seemed a quixotic bid for the presidency.They were an odd pairing from the start. He was the carnival-barker candidate with a penchant for provocation. She was the meticulously dressed, unfailingly polite aide, a former fashion model who developed a nuanced awareness of, and bottomless patience for, her mercurial charge. “She totally understands him,” Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s one-time campaign manager, said in 2016.Unlike other aides, she never had a falling out with Mr. Trump (or wrote a tell-all memoir), serving as the White House communications director and returning for the final year of his administration. But their closeness took a hit when it emerged in 2022 that she had voiced anger in a text message to a colleague over the fallout on Mr. Trump’s staff from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Trump was displeased.That rift may explain why Ms. Hicks, 35, looked visibly uncomfortable as she took the stand Friday morning and, in a notably soft voice, admitted to feeling “nervous.” This, she testified, would be the first time she had spoken in Mr. Trump’s presence in nearly two years.Ms. Hicks, who was reared in the buttoned-up community of Greenwich, Conn., the daughter and granddaughter of public relations men, has long prized discretion, even amid a White House that could be shockingly indiscreet. It was obvious on Friday that her return to the spotlight was not by choice.Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial?The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.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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Change comes neither easily nor naturally at Germany’s two most successful clubs. Will success in the Champions League delay it again?In those few minutes after Niclas Füllkrug had scored, as the Yellow Wall swayed and roared, Borussia Dortmund must have felt the stirring of some distant memory. Waves of attacks pounded down on Paris St.-Germain, now dizzied and wearied. The world shimmered with possibility. A place in the Champions League final felt, for a moment, close enough to touch.This is how it used to be, or at least some approximation of it, back in the days when Dortmund made Europe shake. Gregor Kobel, the team’s goalkeeper, was pulling off daring turns in his own penalty area. Mats Hummels, a fixture in the lineup a decade ago, was spraying languid passes with the outside of his foot. Jadon Sancho and Karim Adeyemi were electric, relentless.There is a chance, of course, that it will all count for nothing. More than a chance, really: Dortmund may live to regret that a second goal never came. P.S.G. had enough opportunities to hint at its threat, too, hitting the post twice in the space of 10 seconds at one point. It may not prove quite so forgiving in the return leg in Paris on Tuesday.But that Dortmund will travel to France with hope — perhaps even with a little expectation — is still an unanticipated development. This was supposed, after all, to be a chastening week for German soccer: Most expected Dortmund and Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga’s two great crisis clubs, to be exposed in the Champions League semifinals. And yet, halfway through, both teams remain vividly alive.Niclas Füllkrug scored the goal that gave Dortmund a 1-0 victory over P.S.G. in their two-legged Champions League semifinal.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDortmund’s case was the more extreme. The club has spent much of this season engaged in a bout of restive soul-searching. Dortmund’s coach, Edin Terzic, has been under such scrutiny for so long that it is probably fair to assume he has memorized the password to his H.R. portal. The club enters this weekend languishing in fifth place in the Bundesliga, its form patchy, its progress stalled.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 director David Leitch narrates a sequence from the film featuring Gosling and Emily Blunt.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Spicy margaritas, bad decisions and one big stunt make up this sequence from “The Fall Guy.”Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman named Colt Seavers alongside Emily Blunt as a cinematographer, Jody Moreno. In this flashback, the two have a flirty conversation over the radio about having a drink after work as Colt prepares for a stunt on set.For the scene, which involves Gosling’s character falling several stories inside a building, the “Fall Guy” director David Leitch said they opted to create the moment practically and have Gosling perform the stunt himself.This meant hooking the actor to a rig called a descender, used to drop a stunt performer off a building, and then a mechanism provides deceleration for the final 10 feet.Read the “Fall Guy” review.Learn about the filmmakers’ campaign for an Oscar for stunts.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

The architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House, a rectangular glass-and-steel residence set on a grassy shelf above a wooded bluff in New Canaan, Conn., has epitomized a certain East Coast ideal of midcentury elegance since its completion in 1949. Before becoming an architect at age 37, Johnson ran the architecture department at MoMA, and the spare, luminous building, which he inhabited for over half a century, embodies the Modernist International Style that he helped define in a landmark exhibition at the museum in 1932. The home also established Johnson himself as the paragon of a specific type of New York architect: erudite, absolutist in his refinement and formidable in his influence wielding, shaping careers, institutions and public opinion like few others in his field.But since the National Trust of Historic Preservation opened the Glass House to the public as a museum in 2007, visitors have discovered there’s more to the place than its namesake centerpiece. By the time Johnson died in 2005, the five acres he’d bought in 1946 had grown tenfold to encompass 14 structures, including experimental follies, a subterranean painting gallery and three wooden homes from earlier periods, including a shingled 18th-century dwelling that Johnson and his partner, the curator David Whitney, would use as a refuge in hot weather. For the past 15 years, however, a pivotal part of the estate has remained semi-concealed: Johnson’s guesthouse, known as the Brick House and situated just 80 feet from the site’s main attraction, has been closed to the public because of water damage. Now, after an extensive restoration and in time for the Glass House’s 75th anniversary, the building has finally been unveiled.The hallway has a granite floor and doubles as a gallery, displaying Brice Marden’s “Etchings to Rexroth” (1986), from the collection of Johnson and his partner, the curator David Whitney.Dean KaufmanJohnson considered the 1,728-square-foot Glass House and its 860-square-foot brick companion, which was built at the same time, two parts of a single home — one alluringly crystalline, the other introverted and opaque. He wrapped the smaller building entirely in iron-spotted red brick and positioned it facing the main house at a slight angle, with a gravel pathway crossing the courtyard between them. The structures are also linked below ground: Along with a bedroom, study, storage room and bathroom, the Brick House contains the unsightly mechanical equipment that supplies the Glass House with electricity and heat, enabling the larger building to maintain its aesthetic purity. Tellingly, Johnson placed the Brick House’s only windows — three big mahogany-framed portholes — on the building’s back side, facing away from his glass retreat. “I didn’t see why the guests should have a window looking out toward my house,” he said in an unpublished 1991 interview for the National Trust. “They can look their own way out to the hill.” But he and Whitney also often slept in the building when they didn’t have visitors.Ibram Lassaw’s welded bronze-and-steel work “Clouds of Magellan,” commissioned for the bedroom in 1953, hangs above the bed.Dean KaufmanThe Brick House is stern, squat and solid, its front interrupted only by a tall, centered black pinewood door. Even Johnson admitted it wasn’t much to look at, calling it “perfectly plain.” But if the exterior is unassuming, Johnson created an unexpected landscape of color, texture and fantastical detail inside. At one end of the bright entrance hall, which runs parallel to the front of the house, a door gives way to the building’s showpiece: a dim, sand-hued bedroom that is at once monastic, womblike and glamorous. Johnson — who never shied away from, as he put it in the 1991 interview, “deliberately copying whatever I felt like” — modeled it after a domed parlor in the early 19th-century London home of the English architect John Soane. Soane described the layered design of that room as “a succession of fanciful effects,’’ and Johnson deployed his own series of clever tricks. First, he built an off-white plaster pavilion inside the 10-by-26-foot room. A row of vaults seem to be supported by 14 superslim columns but are, in fact, suspended from the ceiling and give the room the sheltered quality of a cloister.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

Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage.Stanley Stellar was on Canal Street one Sunday morning in 1976 when a young man with a killer body passed by. Like many New York street photographers, Stellar is curious, bordering on nosy, and he can, when necessary, be a whiz at masking flirtation as flattery to put straight guys at ease.Stellar convinced the man to lift his T-shirt for a photo, and in return Stellar got an eyeful of chest and colorful bird tattoos, a picture Stellar later named “I Got Birds Too.”The man’s shirt went back on and a lightbulb went off.“I walked away from this and went, oh, this is who I am,’” Stellar, 79, said in a recent interview at his TriBeCa apartment.That chance encounter was an awakening that helped fuel Stellar’s decades-long drive to take pictures of unapologetic, maverick gayness as much as he can fit into a day. He’s still at it, as his nearly 40,000 Instagram followers can testify.To be clear, Stellar is gay. Spare him “queer.”“I don’t like how gay has been marginalized and dismissed,” he said. “At this point in my life, I’m not going to go, Oh yeah, I’ve always been a queer artist.’ No.”“I Got Birds Too,” 1976. Stellar’s work is a testament to a time and a community.via Stanley Stellar and Kapp KappWe 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

This month’s picks include a Mexican family drama, a Palestinian coming-of-age tale, a high-school movie from Ukraine and more.‘Familia’Stream it on Netflix.There is a beautifully elastic quality to Rodrigo García’s “Familia,” which follows the myriad members of a Mexican family across a day spent together at their house in the countryside. The story is nothing new. The patriarch, Leo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), wants to sell the estate and retire from the job he has held for most of his life. The proposition unleashes currents of raw emotion at the dinner table, as his children (three daughters and one son) and grandchildren, not to mention their various partners and spouses, reckon with their family home and with each other.Leo’s children embody familiar types: the successful, uptight doctor; the lost, black sheep writer whose marriage is falling apart; the lesbian wild child who loves to provoke. There are jokes and jabs, screaming matches and quiet tears. But everything moves so fluidly in the film — the camera weaves in and around characters like a dancer, and the actors turn in wonderfully unvarnished performances — that not for a second does it feel trite. The unpredictable shifts from rancor to resentment to tenderness feel natural, and in lieu of any pat resolutions, “Familia” leaves us with the bittersweet fact that love and loss go hand in hand.‘Laapataa Ladies’Stream it on Netflix.In Kiran Rao’s charming small-town comedy, a man disembarks a train with someone else’s bride by accident, prompting great chaos. The premise of “Laapataa Ladies” may sound ridiculous on paper, but each detail, as it unfolds, is entirely plausible and reveals a lot about the violence — and absurdity — of patriarchal customs in rural India. As it happens, Deepak (Sparsh Srivastav) and Phool (Nitanshi Goel) are married on a day considered auspicious for weddings, so when they board the train, there are three other newlywed couples in their coach. Plus, all three brides are wearing identical red wedding veils that completely cover their faces, per tradition.So when Deepak drowsily grabs one of the women’s hands to leave in the middle of the night, it’s not until much later that he realizes that Phool is still asleep on the train, and he has brought home a stranger, Pushpa Rani (Pratibha Ranta). Then an elaborate game begins: Deepak enlists the local (and corrupt) police to find Phool and send back Pushpa Rani; his wife, having landed up in some other town, tries to find her way back to a man and a marital home she knows nothing about; and Pushpa Rani sets in motion a curious plot of her own, whose contours slowly emerge over the course of the movie. In the guise of a funny, suspenseful and crowd-pleasing caper, Rao delivers a scathing critique of misogynistic traditions.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