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      A New Diplomatic Strategy Emerges as Artificial Intelligence Grows

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      The new U.S. approach to cyberthreats comes as early optimism about a “global internet” connecting the world has been shattered.American and Chinese diplomats plan to meet later this month to begin what amounts to the first, tentative arms control talks over the use of artificial intelligence.A year in the making, the talks in Geneva are an attempt to find some common ground on how A.I. will be used and in which situations it could be banned — for example, in the command and control of each country’s nuclear arsenals.The fact that Beijing agreed to the discussion at all was something of a surprise, since it has refused any discussion of limiting the size of nuclear arsenals themselves.But for the Biden administration, the conversation represents the first serious foray into a new realm of diplomacy, which Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke about on Monday in a speech in San Francisco at the RSA Conference, Silicon Valley’s annual convention on both the technology and the politics of securing cyberspace.The Biden administration’s strategy goes beyond the rules of managing cyberconflict and focuses on American efforts to assure control over physical technologies like undersea cables, which connect countries, companies and individual users to cloud services.Yuri Gripas for The New York Times“It’s true that ‘move fast and break things’ is literally the exact opposite of what we try to do at the State Department,” Mr. Blinken told the thousands of cyberexperts, coders and entrepreneurs, a reference to the Silicon Valley mantra about technological disruption.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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      U.K. to Accuse China of Cyberattacks Targeting Voter Data and Lawmakers

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      The British government believes China has overseen two separate hacking campaigns, including one that yielded information from 40 million voters.The British government is expected to publicly link China to cyberattacks that compromised the voting records of tens of millions of people, another notable hardening of Britain’s stance toward China since its leaders heralded a “golden era” in British-Chinese relations nearly a decade ago.The deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, will make a statement about the matter in Parliament on Monday afternoon, and is expected to announce sanctions against state-affiliated individuals and entities implicated in the attacks.The government disclosed the attack on the Electoral Commission last year but did not identify those behind it. It is believed to have begun in 2021 and lasted several months, with the personal details of 40 million voters being hacked.The Electoral Commission, which oversees elections in the United Kingdom, said that the names and addresses of anyone registered to vote in Britain and Northern Ireland between 2014 and 2022 had been accessed, as well as those of overseas voters.The commission previously said that the data contained in the electoral registers was limited and noted that much of it was already in the public domain. However, it added that it was possible the data “could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of behavior or to identify and profile individuals.”In addition to the infiltration of the Electoral Commission, Mr. Dowden is expected to confirm that the Chinese targeted several members of Parliament with a record of hawkish statements about China. They include Iain Duncan-Smith, a former leader of the Conservative Party; Tim Loughton, a former Conservative education minister; and Stewart McDonald, a member of the Scottish National Party.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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      U.S. Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space

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      American spy agencies are divided on whether Moscow would go so far, but the concern is urgent enough that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has asked China and India to try to talk Russia down.When Russia conducted a series of secret military satellite launches around the time of its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, American intelligence officials began delving into the mystery of what, exactly, the Russians were doing.Later, spy agencies discovered Russia was working on a new kind of space-based weapon that could threaten the thousands of satellites that keep the world connected.In recent weeks, a new warning has circulated from America’s spy agencies: Another launch may be in the works, and the question is whether Russia plans to use it to put a real nuclear weapon into space — a violation of a half-century-old treaty. The agencies are divided on the likelihood that President Vladimir V. Putin would go so far, but nonetheless the intelligence is an urgent concern to the Biden administration.Even if Russia does place a nuclear weapon in orbit, U.S. officials are in agreement in their assessment that the weapon would not be detonated. Instead, it would lurk as a time bomb in low orbit, a reminder from Mr. Putin that if he was pressed too hard with sanctions, or military opposition to his ambitions in Ukraine or beyond, he could destroy economies without targeting humans on earth.Despite the uncertainties, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken raised the possibility of the Russian nuclear move with his Chinese and Indian counterparts on Friday and Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.Mr. Blinken’s message was blunt: Any nuclear detonation in space would take out not only American satellites but also those in Beijing and New Delhi.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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      Congressman Who Broke With G.O.P. on Mayorkas Vote Will Not Seek Re-election

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      Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, once seen as a rising star, made the announcement just days after voting against impeaching the homeland security secretary.Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, announced on Saturday that he would not run for re-election, just days after breaking with his party to cast a decisive vote against impeachment charges for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary.Mr. Gallagher, who is in his fourth congressional term, is joining dozens of other lawmakers who have decided to call it quits. But the timing of his decision was striking nonetheless, coming on the heels of his impeachment vote — which had already earned him a primary challenger — and his relative youth, compared with others who are planning to retire from Congress.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Mr. Gallagher, 39, said in a statement, adding that he had made the decision not to run “with a heavy heart.”Mr. Gallagher, a Marine Corps veteran and a former congressional staffer, was an influential voice in the House when it came to matters of national security and the military. He was particularly outspoken about the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as cybersecurity, having co-chaired an intergovernmental commission on the issue early in his congressional career.Last year, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy selected him to lead a new committee tasked with investigating threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party, he was the youngest Republican wielding a panel chairman’s gavel.Mr. Gallagher also caught the eye of Senate Republican recruiters, who attempted last year to convince him to run against Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. But Mr. Gallagher decided against that bid, announcing at the time that he would seek re-election to the House.His standing in the G.O.P. appeared to have shifted earlier this week, however, after he became the third House Republican to refuse to back the impeachment effort against Mr. Mayorkas. The charges, of refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust, were widely dismissed by legal experts as not meeting the constitutional threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.The effort to impeach Mr. Mayorkas failed by just one vote.“The proponents of impeachment failed to make the argument as to how his stunning incompetence meets the impeachment threshold,” Mr. Gallagher said in a statement this week defending his decision, arguing that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would “set a dangerous new precedent that will be weaponized against future Republican administrations.”The House is expected to try to impeach Mr. Mayorkas again next week, once Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House’s No. 2 Republican who has been absent while undergoing treatment for blood cancer, returns to Washington.Mr. Gallagher did not say precisely what he planned to do next, though he indicated that his next role would also be in the national security space.“Though my title may change, my mission will always be the same,” he said in a statement. “Deter America’s enemies and defend the Constitution.” More

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      U.S. Hits Back at Iran With Sanctions, Criminal Charges and Airstrikes

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      In the hours before the United States carried out strikes against Iran-backed militants on Friday, Washington hit Tehran with more familiar weapons: sanctions and criminal charges.The Biden administration imposed sanctions on officers and officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s premier military force, for threatening the integrity of water utilities and for helping manufacture Iranian drones. And it unsealed charges against nine people for selling oil to finance the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.The timing seemed designed to pressure the Revolutionary Guards and its most elite unit, the Quds Force, at a moment of extraordinary tension in the Middle East. Although the sanctions have been brewing for some time and the charges were filed earlier under seal, the region has been in turmoil for months.The actions are part of a coordinated governmentwide effort to disrupt Iran’s efforts to use illicit oil sales to fund terrorism, and to push back on the country’s increasingly capable offensive cyberoperations. In the 15 years since the United States mounted a major cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the country has trained a generation of hackers and struck back at Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, among others. Two American officials said the United States conducted cyberoperations against Iranian targets on Friday but declined to provide details.The effects of sanctions and indictments are hard to measure. Few Iranian officers or officials keep assets in Western banks or travel to the United States, meaning the sanctions may have little practical effect. While the indictments and sanctions have a psychological element, demonstrating to Iranians and their business associates around the world that Western intelligence agencies are often tracking their movements and their transactions, actual arrests and trials are infrequent.“The reason that we bring these cases is, we know that the money Iran obtains from the illicit sale of oil is used to fund its malign activities around the world,” Matthew G. Olsen, who heads the national security division of the Justice Department, said on Friday. “The threats posed by Iran and the destabilizing effects of its actions have only come into sharper relief since the attacks of Oct. 7,” the day of the Hamas attack on Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people.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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      How Russian and Chinese Interference Could Affect the 2024 Election

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      The stakes for Russia in the presidential vote are large. Other adversaries also might try to deepen divisions among American voters.The U.S. government is preparing for its adversaries to intensify efforts to influence American voters next year. Russia has huge stakes in the presidential election. China seems poised to back a more aggressive campaign. Other countries, like Iran, might again try to sow division in the United States.As Washington looks ahead to the 2024 vote, U.S. intelligence agencies last week released a report on the 2022 midterm elections — a document that gives us some hints about what might be to come.Spy agencies concluded Russia favored Trump in 2016. What about in 2024?Russia appears to be paying close attention to the election, as its war in Ukraine is soon to enter a third year.Former President Donald J. Trump, the leading Republican candidate, has expressed skepticism about Ukraine funding. President Biden has argued that assisting Ukraine is in America’s interest.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?  More

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      In Legal Peril at Home, Trump Turns to a U.K. Court for Vindication

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      On a day when he lashed out at a federal judge in Washington, the former president asked a judge in London to let his lawsuit over the notorious Steele dossier go forward.Donald J. Trump was thousands of miles away from the vaulted chamber in Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice on Monday. But his words echoed in a lawsuit he has filed in London against Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose dossier of unproven links between Mr. Trump and Russia caused a political uproar back in 2017.“The inaccurate personal data in the Dossier has, and continues, to cause me significant damage and distress,” the former president said in a signed statement circulated by his lawyers. “A judgment of the English court on this issue will be an immense relief to me as it will completely confirm the true position to the public.”Mr. Trump’s words came on a day of trans-Atlantic legal maneuvering. At home, he lashed out against a judge in Washington who imposed a limited gag order on him in the federal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In London, lawyers for Mr. Trump invoked their client’s testimony to argue that Mr. Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had breached British data protection laws.This is the first case Mr. Trump has filed in Britain related to the dossier, published just before he took office, and it appears calculated to find more favorable legal terrain after a federal judge in Florida threw out a lawsuit last year that Mr. Trump filed against Mr. Steele, Hillary Clinton, and others, related to the Russia allegations.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said his client would give evidence in court if the justice, Karen Steyn, agreed to let the case go to trial. But a lawyer for Orbis argued that the court should throw out the case because the statute of limitations had expired on Mr. Trump’s claims of data protection violations.Antony White, the lawyer for Orbis, said any damage to Mr. Trump’s reputation resulted from the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed in January 2017, over which Mr. Steele had no control. He also noted that Mr. Trump only brought his case in Britain after his case against Mr. Steele was dismissed in the United States.Mr. White suggested it was a pattern of frivolous litigation against Mr. Steele. He was in the courtroom, taking copious notes and nodding or shaking his head as his lawyers, and Mr. Trump’s, made their arguments on the first day of a two-day hearing.Christopher Steele, center, a former British spy whose dossier of unproven links between Mr. Trump and Russia caused a political uproar in 2017, leaving court after a hearing on Monday in London.Aaron Chown/Press Association, via Associated Press“The claim has no real prospect of success and there is no other compelling reason why it should proceed to a trial,” Mr. Steele’s lawyers said in a filing. “In any event, the claim should be struck out as an abuse of process because it has been brought for an illegitimate and vexatious purpose.”To be sure, none of the inflammatory allegations in Mr. Steele’s dossier — including reports that Mr. Trump made illicit payments to Russian officials or cavorted with prostitutes on visits to Russia — have been substantiated. The F.B.I. concluded that one of the key allegations — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.But Mr. Trump said that Mr. Steele has continued to argue that the dossier was accurate. He cited a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, last May, in which Mr. Steele said, “Our Trump-Russia reporting has not been ‘discredited.’ In fact its main tenets continue to hold up well and almost no detail has been disproven.”Mr. Trump denied that he had subjected Mr. Steele to what Mr. Steele called a “barrage of abuse and threats,” saying he had no role in reported cyberattacks on Mr. Steele’s business or in the publication of the home addresses of his children. Mr. Trump also claimed that Mr. Steele had impugned the reputation of his eldest daughter, Ivanka.“My daughter, Ivanka, is completely irrelevant to this claim and any mention of her only serves to distract this court from the defendant and Mr. Steele’s reckless behavior,” he said in his statement. “Any inference or allegation that Mr. Steele makes about my relationship with my daughter is untrue and disgraceful.”It was not clear what statements by Mr. Steele that Mr. Trump was citing. Mr. Steele exchanged emails with Ms. Trump a decade before her father ran for president, according to ABC News and CNN.Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Tomlinson, acknowledged his client was not given to subtlety or precision in his statements, and that Mr. Trump had a long history of litigation in the United States, not all of it successful. He uses language “more familiar to U.S. than U.K. political discourse,” he said.“It’s uncontroversial for me to say President Trump is a controversial figure,” he said. “He often expresses himself in very strong language.”But Mr. Tomlinson said Mr. Trump was entitled to be vindicated, and to receive at least nominal damages, for the reputational harm he had suffered from allegations that he said were entirely erroneous. Though Mr. Steele did not publish the dossier, he said, it would not have existed if he had not produced it.He pointed to a ruling in 2020, in which two Russian business moguls, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, won damages of 18,000 pounds ($22,900) each from Mr. Steele’s firm after they argued that allegations about them in the dossier violated data protection laws.The court ruled that Orbis had “failed to take reasonable steps to verify” claims that Mr. Fridman and Mr. Aven, who controlled Alfa Bank, had made illicit payments to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the judge dismissed several other claims.Mr. Steele has not denied sharing the dossier with journalists. But he rejected the contention that he has sought to promote its contents since then.“I declined to provide any media interviews for three-and-a-half years after the publication of the dossier by Buzzfeed, despite being asked multiple times by major international media organizations,” he testified in a witness statement. “If I had wanted to ‘promote’ the dossier as Mr. Trump suggests, I obviously would have taken up those media opportunities.” More

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      Your Thursday Briefing: Biden Vows Not to ‘Waver’ After NATO Summit

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      Also, Chinese hackers hit the State Department, ocean temperatures rise and Milan Kundera dies.President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden met yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times‘We will not waver,’ Biden says after the NATO summitPresident Biden concluded the meeting of NATO allies by comparing the battle to expel Russia from Ukraine with the Cold War struggle for freedom in Europe. “We will not waver,” he promised in a speech.Biden seemed to be preparing Americans and the allies for a confrontation that could go on for years. He cast the war, which has been going on for almost a year and a half, as a test of wills with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who is intent on fighting. Biden insisted that NATO’s unity would hold.“Putin still wrongly believes he can outlast Ukraine,” Biden said, describing the Russian leader as a man who made a huge strategic mistake in invading a neighboring country. “After all this time, Putin still doubts our staying power. He is making a bad bet.”Ukraine: The alliance has formed a new council intended to give Ukraine an equal voice on issues related to its security alongside member states. China: Beijing criticized a NATO statement that accused it of a military expansion that threatens the West, saying that the alliance was still stuck in a Cold War mentality.Uncertainty in Russia’s top ranks: Gen. Sergei Surovikin, once a Wagner ally, hasn’t been seen publicly since the mutiny last month. A top lawmaker said he was “taking a rest.”Another top commander was killed in an airstrike in Ukraine. And a third former commander was gunned down while out on a jog.Microsoft said the hack was discovered last month.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersChinese hackers targeted the U.S. State DepartmentChinese hackers targeted specific State Department email accounts in the weeks before Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to China last month, U.S. officials said.The hack, which went undetected for a month, comes at a time of heightened diplomatic tensions between the countries. “The Biden administration is trying to reset relations with Beijing,” Julian Barnes, who covers national security for The Times, told me. “The U.S. does not want that dialogue to end. So there is an interest in downplaying this.”No classified email or cloud systems were said to have been breached, and the hack did not initially appear to be directly related to Blinken’s trip. Still, the attack was sophisticated.The hackers targeted specific accounts, instead of carrying out a broad-brush intrusion, which Chinese hackers are suspected of having done before. U.S. officials did not identify which accounts were targeted. The breach revealed a significant security gap in Microsoft’s cloud, where the U.S. government has been transferring data from internal servers.“We’ve had all these promises that the cloud is not only going to be just as secure, but that it will be more secure,” Julian said. “But here’s an example where basic security was breached and the information was stolen. That has opened us up to a new avenue of attack: Here is the first big cloud attack on the U.S. government email.”Tech: The Biden administration thinks it can slow China’s economic growth and its A.I. industry by cutting it off from semiconductor chips. The plan could handicap China for a generation, but if it backfires it could hasten the very future the U.S. wants to avoid.Elena ShaoAn ocean heat wave threatens marine lifeThe water surrounding Florida is much hotter than most swimming pools in the U.S. are right now. This could pose a severe risk to coral and marine life in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. But the real worry is that it’s only July: Corals usually experience the most heat stress in August and September.The maritime heat wave has pushed water temperatures into the 90s Fahrenheit, or above 32 Celsius. Surface temperatures in these waters are the hottest on record; some beachgoers in Florida even compared the ocean to bath water.The science: When the sea gets too hot, corals bleach, expelling the algae they eat. If waters don’t cool quickly enough, or if bleaching events happen in close succession, the corals die. That can lead to ripple effects across the ecosystem.THE LATEST NEWSAround the WorldPresident Mahmoud Abbas’s visit was widely reported as his first to Jenin in more than a decade.Nasser Nasser/Associated PressPresident Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority visited Jenin, the West Bank city targeted by Israeli raids last week, in a show of authority.U.S. inflation cooled in June, offering good news for consumers and the Federal Reserve.Black women in Latin America are more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth because of systemic medical racism and sexism, a U.N. report said.“Succession” got the most nominations for the Emmy Awards.Other Big StoriesA former Mozambican official accused in the $2 billion “tuna” scandal, a scheme that defrauded U.S. investors, was extradited to New York.The BBC staff member suspended on allegations of sexual misconduct was identified by his wife as Huw Edwards, an anchor on the network’s flagship nightly news program.International demand for drugs has unleashed a wave of violence in Ecuador that is unlike anything in the country’s recent history.Snow fell in Johannesburg for the first time in more than a decade.A Morning ReadBhuchung Sonam’s publishing ventures have printed dozens of books.Poras Chaudhary for The New York TimesBuchung Sonam fled Tibet in the 1980s. Later, he co-founded a publishing house for Tibetan writing, hoping literature could be a salve for other exiles.As Beijing tightens its crackdown on Tibet, detaining writers and intellectuals, many say Sonam’s press is helping Tibet’s literature become a proxy for the nation-state.“It’s not like I can live my life on Tibetan land,” said Tenzin Dickie, a writer and editor, “but I can live it in Tibetan literature.”ARTS AND IDEASMilan Kundera in 1984.Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesMilan Kundera dies at 94“It’s hard to overstate how central Milan Kundera was, in the mid-1980s, to literary culture in America and elsewhere,” my colleague Dwight Garner writes in an appraisal of Kundera’s life.Kundera, who died in Paris this week at 94, wrote mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” which was adapted into a film, is his most famous book.“He was the best-known Czech writer since Kafka,” Dwight continued, “and his fiction brought news of sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.Mix this Thai-style vegetable salad.What to WatchIn “Amanda,” a dark Italian comedy, a delusional graduate befriends an agoraphobic misanthrope.FashionMore men are baring their midriffs in crop tops.Tech TipHow does Meta’s Threads stack up against Twitter? Read our review.Now Time to PlayFill in the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Broke ground in a garden (four letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you tomorrow! — AmeliaP.S. Alice Callahan will be our new nutrition reporter.“The Daily” is on the U.S. labor market.We’d love to hear from you. Write: briefing@nytimes.com. More