Author: NY TIMES

President Vladimir V. Putin declared on Friday that Russia would produce new intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles and then decide whether to deploy them within range of NATO nations in Europe and American allies in Asia.Mr. Putin’s threat was vaguely worded: He said nothing about timetables for deploying the weapons, and by blaming the United States for bringing similar missiles into training exercises in Europe and Asia, he seemed to be signaling he was open to negotiations.But his timing was critical, because he made the announcement just as major elections were about to begin in Britain and France, and days ahead of…

To the political strategy that might in the future be called “transparent efforts to change the narrative and repair the damage done to Joe Biden in the first presidential debate,” add the dress that Jill Biden wore to accompany her husband to his next-day rally in Raleigh, N.C.As President Biden attempted to address some of the concerns about his age and energy on Friday, his wife, a political spouse who often seems to choose clothes that recede into the background, took her place by his side in a navy blue crepe dress plastered with one word over and over again:…

Two NASA astronauts who traveled at the start of June to the International Space Station were originally scheduled to return home a couple of weeks ago, completing a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.Instead, the astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will remain on the station for several weeks longer as NASA and Boeing engineers continue to study misbehaving thrusters on the vehicle.But don’t call the astronauts stuck or stranded, officials said on Friday. And there’s no talk of a rescue mission.“We’re not stuck on I.S.S.,” Mark Nappi, the program manager at Boeing for Starliner, said during a news conference…

A scientist whose research has been at the center of controversy over an Alzheimer’s drug candidate has been charged with fraud.A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York, on charges of falsifying data to obtain grants totaling roughly $16 million from the National Institutes of Health.Dr. Wang’s studies underpinned research into a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and simufilam, a drug in advanced clinical trials. Simufilam’s manufacturer, Cassava Sciences, a pharmaceutical company based in Texas, has said the drug improves cognition in Alzheimer’s patients.Alzheimer’s disease affects roughly six million Americans…

When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.“Men want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn’t be loved by anyone anymore,” Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. “But for me that’s not true. I want to tell other women there’s no cause for despair.” In “Last Summer,” which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.Since…

Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War whose warning about the impending attacks in early 1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that became known as the Tet offensive was ignored by higher-ups, died on June 11 in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Amy Stork, chief of public affairs for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence. Specialist Allen, who enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to use her intelligence training to save lives. She had been the…

The European Cup has been soaked in beer. In the fan zone and outside the stadium. In the halls and in the stands.Everyone got wet. To the amusement of fans, players and, to the amusement of everyone without a leash, reporters kept hiding from their laptops and walking into press conferences smelling of alcohol.Get a little violin. Maybe a towel.We do need to talk about the plastic cups that cascade down from the stands towards anyone taking a corner kick or a goal kick.First, though, the beer.The official sponsor of the competition is German beer manufacturer Bitburger, and the bar…

When Eric Tyler Rothman threw a tennis ball at Courtney Arielle DiGia’s head with the word “prom?” on it at Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y., during the summer of 2012, neither of them expected that 12 years later, they would marry.It seemed especially unlikely because after taking a single photo together at the camp’s prom, they went their separate ways and didn’t speak again — until both ended up at Duke University in the fall of 2014.“Our camp always did camp T-shirt day, which was like a random day in November, so we met up that freshman year to…

Roughly three million borrowers with federal student loans will see their monthly payments paused in the coming days, as the Biden administration tries to recalculate their bills to comply with a federal court order in Kansas.The recalculations are necessary because key parts of President Biden’s new student loan repayment program, SAVE, were temporarily blocked by two federal judges on Monday, just a week before many borrowers’ payments were scheduled to be reduced by as much as half.The judges, in Kansas and Missouri, issued separate preliminary injunctions this week, leaving the SAVE plan’s eight million enrollees in limbo until lawsuits, filed…

Paul Sperry, a tenor who championed little-known American art song and spiky contemporary works, and was praised for his incisive performances of the classics, died on June 13 in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure, his son Ethan said.In a discipline where his peers tended to stick to tried-and-true German and French classics from the 19th and 20th centuries, Mr. Sperry carved out a niche, singing songs by living composers from his own country. But he also took on some of the most difficult late-20th-century Europeans, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze,…