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Ukraine-Russia War: Live Updates – The New York Times

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Diplomats from countries including China attending talks in Saudi Arabia, in a handout photo from the Saudi Press Agency.Credit…Saudi Press Agency

Top officials from more than 40 countries, including some with strong links to Russia like China and India, gathered in Saudi Arabia this weekend to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine.

For Ukraine, the talks were part of a bid to win the support of dozens of countries that have remained on the sidelines of the war, further isolating Russia. The discussion did not have Russian participation and did not yield a formal declaration or statement.

And yet there was a glimmer of progress. China, which did not attend previous talks in June, was an active participant this time and signaled that it was willing to attend a third round of talks — one that could be a precursor to a meeting of heads of state, according to a European Union official.

Nearly 18 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomatic efforts to end the fighting have produced few concrete results. One of the few tangible agreements was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey. But that deal, which allowed Ukraine to transport grain across the Black Sea, now lies in tatters, another sign that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is digging in for an extended conflict.

Part of the reason that peace talks have failed so far is that both Ukraine and Russia are focused on grinding out territorial gains on the battlefield. And as the war has stretched on, the fighting is spreading, with Ukraine openly taking credit for attacks deep behind Russian lines. Attack drones are becoming an increasingly frequent sight in Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has proposed a 10-point plan that would hold Russia accountable for war atrocities, and require it to surrender all captured Ukrainian territory and pay what could be hundreds of billions in reparations for war damage, demands the Kremlin flatly rejects.

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on Monday that Russia would discuss the results of the talks with other BRICS nations — an acronym encompassing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — that participated in the meeting. She described Mr. Zelensky’s proposal as “a senseless ultimatum to Russia,” aimed at “prolonging hostilities.”

Even so, the gathering in Jeddah, a Saudi port on the Red Sea, focused on some elements of Mr. Zelensky’s plan. The participants, the E.U. official said, agreed to start working groups to address issues including global food security, nuclear safety, environmental security, humanitarian aid, the release of prisoners of war and the return of children separated from their families.

Over the last two days, Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, held bilateral meetings with representatives of more than 30 countries. On the messaging app Telegram, he listed many nations: the United States, Britain, Germany, Turkey, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. He did not say whether he met with representatives from China or India.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said Monday that the “only basic ‘foundation for negotiations’” was the Ukrainian president’s proposal. “There can be no compromise positions,” he added in a post on social media.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.

A Tiny Gap Reveals a Yawning One for the U.S. Women’s Team

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Even in the highest-resolution image, examined up close, there was not so much as a discernible sliver of daylight. The margin by which the United States was eliminated from the Women’s World Cup was so microscopic that it cannot be expressed in a unit of measurement the country fully recognizes.

A millimeter, a single millimeter, is no more than 0.04 inches, yet even that most slender gap can serve as the gossamer border between two realities. Such is the unspoken truth of sports, of course: The difference between triumph and disaster, delight and dismay, can be far thinner than we choose to pretend.

For the United States, there is some comfort in that. “It is tough to have your World Cup end by a millimeter,” Alyssa Naeher, the U.S. goalkeeper, said after her team’s loss to Sweden in a penalty shootout Sunday. It does not take an especially vivid imagination to envision how the outcome might have been different.

Had Naeher intercepted Lina Hurtig’s shot at a slightly different angle, maybe the spin would have carried the ball to safety. Had Hurtig struck her penalty more softly, or more firmly, maybe Naeher would have saved it more decisively. Granted a reprieve, maybe the United States would have gone on to win that game in the round of 16, the tournament, the crown. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

That solace, though, is an illusion, and so too is the idea that the United States was eliminated by a millimeter. It was not one penalty that ended its hopes of a third straight title and, in the process, drew the veil over a whole golden, glorious generation, no matter how tempting it might be to believe. This is another unspoken truth of sports: Moments do not exist in isolation.

There is a certain irony in the fact that it was against Sweden that the United States, so limp and insipid earlier in the tournament, started to show signs of life. Naomi Girma was imperious. Lindsey Horan was dynamic. Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Lynn Williams were all, at various points, electric. There were glimpses, in Melbourne, Australia, of what this team might one day be.

But that should not disguise the shortcomings of what came before. The United States was only in position to be knocked out by Sweden because it had failed to beat both the Netherlands and — more troubling — Portugal in the group stage.

The United States, the two-time reigning champion and pretournament favorite and great superpower of women’s soccer, won only one game in Australia and New Zealand, and that was against Vietnam. It was not even supposed to be in Melbourne. It was meant to be in Sydney, playing the Group G runner-up, at a time that had been specially arranged so that it was not in the middle of the long American night or early in the morning.

The spin of the ball, the single millimeter, was the culmination of a succession of failures, ones that can most immediately be traced to the last two weeks, but the roots of which stretch back not just months but years. To dismiss this disappointment as merely a cruel twist of fate is to risk failing to learn from those failures, making them endemic.

It is not enough, for example, to point the finger of blame at the coach, Vlatko Andonovski. He will, most likely, be removed from his position before his contract expires at the end of the year, and it is hard to make a case for his retention. This is the worst performance an American team has mustered at a World Cup. A price has to be paid.

But Andonovski is not the cause of the malaise. There are structural, systemic issues that have to be addressed, too. There are issues with the way the United States produces players, a fragmented system is reliant on pay-to-play youth teams in disparate leagues, unattached to elite adult teams, feeding into the college system.

That was fine when the United States effectively had a monopoly on professionalized women’s soccer, before the major men’s teams of Europe and South America decided — and let’s not cast them as the good guys here, given how long it took — that maybe women might enjoy the chance to play the sport.

In an ecosystem in which the intellectual and financial weight of global soccer can be deployed to hothouse talented young players, the American approach is not so much lacking as a guarantee of failure. So, too, is the continued emphasis on physicality, rather than cunning, that such a system favors. It is not a coincidence that the United States was eliminated from the tournament when its one player of genuine invention, Rose Lavelle, was absent. Lavelle is the one player, after all, that her country simply cannot replace.

Nurturing talent, though, is just the first problem. It is significant that Horan is the only member of Andonovski’s squad currently playing in Europe. Others, including Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, have spent time there, but most have been drawn back to play in the surging National Women’s Soccer League.

That is, in many ways, good. A healthy domestic league is not only desirable but a crucial ingredient in success. But it also hints at a creeping isolationism, a disconnection from Europe’s major leagues, which are now emerging as the game’s fiscal engine and its intellectual crucible, too.

The United States needs players competing against their rivals and peers in the Champions League, not only as a finishing school but as a way to better understand their relative strength. Smith, for example, is lavishly gifted, but is she more so than Lauren James of England, Aitana Bonmatí of Spain or Linda Caicedo of Colombia? Answering that question is crucial for understanding how to set expectations.

Most immediately, though, what is required is a generational shift. It is, as Rapinoe herself put it, a “sick joke” that her last act at a World Cup will be missing a penalty. She has already confirmed she will retire at the end of the N.W.S.L. season. There are others, though, who may have to be ushered into the autumn of their careers rather less willingly.

That is never a pain-free process, and it will be all the more agonizing because of all this team has achieved. Naeher, Morgan, Julie Ertz, Kelley O’Hara and Crystal Dunn — as well as the absent Becky Sauerbrunn — have all enjoyed distinguished, glittering careers, the final, glorious ambassadors of a generation that won two World Cups.

Moving on would always be difficult in a purely sporting sense. It is made all the more charged, though, because of what this team means in a cultural one. They are, rightly, revered as players but they are also admired because of the causes — equal pay, equal rights, the struggle against racism and misogyny and homophobia — that they have willingly adopted.

They mean something to people, to fans, in a way that other athletes do not. The adoration, the loyalty, the fervor they have inspired has more in common with political or cultural idols than it does with humdrum sports fandom.

As Rapinoe has always acknowledged, though, the activism has to flow downstream from the sport. Winning, she said, is necessary because it is the precondition for people wanting to hear what you have to say. Victory has always been what allowed the U.S. players to speak their minds and to make their stands to the most people.

It follows, then, that when they are no longer almost a guarantee of winning — when they might, in some senses, make success less likely — then they cannot be protected for what they represent, for what they mean, rather than what they do. There comes a point when they have to be judged as athletes, not activists, and that means knowing when to say goodbye.

None of that would have been changed had Naeher managed to keep out Hurtig’s penalty, had the ball spun just out, had that microscopic difference worked in the Americans’ favor. This United States team was always coming to the end of its road. No matter where the ball landed, there was never any other reality than the one the United States finds itself in now, at the end of one era and the start of another.

How to Visit Aspen on a Budget

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Over an $8.50 pint of craft beer from Aspen Brewing Company, which is comparable to what I pay at home in Chicago, I realized that Aspen, Colo., is not expensive by big-city standards. It’s expensive by small-town standards.

The Economic Research Institute, which compiles financial data for public and private organizations, pegs the cost of living in Aspen at 51 percent higher than the average in the United States, a little less than a city like Seattle.

As a professionally penny-pinching traveler, I try to avoid paying urban prices in the mountains. In the summer in Aspen, apart from my weakness for microbrews, I didn’t have to.

For those who don’t care to shop for Prada or Gucci clothing, or don’t maintain elaborate second mansions here, Aspen’s essential appeal lies in the outdoors — mountains, wildlife, rivers — which, compared with winter, when you might need to rent ski equipment or pay for mountain access, is a steal. Hiking and city bus transportation are free. Cycling, if you can avoid expensive rentals, is a bargain. Parks beckon picnickers, and free cultural attractions abound.

Over the course of three days in Aspen, I spent about $600 before airfare, with most of that on lodging. Here’s how I cheaped out in a resort town synonymous with wealth.

An annual winter visitor to Aspen, I touched down in July, astonished at how dramatic the mountains looked without fluffy layers of snow to soften their jagged edges.

From the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport, nearly four miles from downtown, the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority buses are free to and around town, saving more than $20 on a taxi and delivering the moral satisfaction of speeding by bumper-to-bumper traffic in a bus-only lane.

Within 10 minutes, I reached town and walked a few blocks to my Main Street accommodations at the Tyrolean Lodge, a relatively affordable, family-run hotel decorated in vintage ski gear and backcountry photos that the local Aspen Times once called “a dying breed in Aspen.”

“There used to be small lodges all over Aspen owned by families and not corporations,” said Pierre Wille, the general manager, whose family has owned the Tyrolean since 1970.

Fifteen of its 16 rooms accommodate five people in three beds, and all have efficiency kitchens with free coffee to help guests economize on meals. I paid $267 a night including taxes and fees, which, for budget travelers, is expensive for one person, but a find for families and groups, potentially knocking the price down to $53 a night per person. By comparison, rates at the luxury Hotel Jerome were running $1,275 a night. Even the more modest Limelight Hotel Aspen was charging over $700 a night.

“We’re interested in keeping Aspen affordable,” Mr. Wille said. “A ski bum can still sort of make it.”

A summer bum, I was relieved to find the lodge offered free bikes. The fleet of eight hand-me-downs solidly beat the offerings at local shops, which mostly rent only electric bikes, charging $130 a day for e-bike rentals.

I pedaled my single-speed cruiser to the nearby Rio Grande Trail, which runs down the valley following the Roaring Fork River from Aspen 42 miles to Glenwood Springs. I breezed as far as Woody Creek, about eight miles, before turning around for the uphill return, consoling myself with extended wildflower-viewing time as other cyclists whizzed past on e-bikes.

As skiing is to winter, hiking is to summer. Several trails take off from town, and anyone who hikes up Aspen Mountain can take the gondola back down free.

Among the stars of the Elk Mountains that surround Aspen are the “14ers,” or 14,000-foot-plus peaks, including Maroon Peak and North Maroon Peak, collectively known as the Maroon Bells, about 10 miles west of town.

One look at the majestic pyramidal pair reflected in Maroon Lake at the base of the Maroon Bells Scenic Area explains why more than 300,000 visitors come here each year. To quell traffic between May and October, RFTA runs a bus ($16 by reservation) to the area from Aspen Highlands, one of the four ski mountains that make up Aspen Snowmass (a free RFTA bus travels between town and Aspen Highlands).

I booked the day’s first lightly trafficked shuttle at 7 a.m. on a chilly, bright morning and hit the trail to Crater Lake, 3.6 miles round-trip, for closer mountain views. Stands of aspen gave way to alpine meadows blooming with wild columbine and aspen sunflowers. The trail bisected one rock pile occupied by a family of pika, pudgy rabbit relatives who vocalized like squeaky toys.

By 9 a.m., as I descended back to the bus base, a steady stream of hikers were making their way up the trail with cellphone cameras pointed lakeside at a family of moose.

While the outdoors are free, the indoors — namely restaurants and bars — require strategy.

“With happy hours, you’re golden,” advised my famously thrifty brother-in-law Chuck Leavitt, who lives near Aspen, noting the happy-hour deals that many restaurants offer during off-peak hours.

There are few locations better than Ajax Tavern, with a sprawling outdoor patio at the foot of Aspen Mountain. Its happy-hour deals slash margaritas from a nosebleed $19 to a reasonable $8. But the signature truffle fries, undiscounted, cost $21, and food specials like arancini at $15 weren’t enough for dinner.

Besides limited menus, the problem with happy hours is adjusting to dining between the early-bird hours of 3 and 6 p.m., which I managed the next day at Mezzaluna. A veggie pizza ($14) from its happy-hour menu provided ample leftovers for breakfast.

Lunches, thankfully, were easier. A sizable slice of pepperoni pizza at New York Pizza set me back $6.25. Red Fox Frozen Yogurt offers self-serve by the ounce (75 cents) so I limited myself to a $2 cup. My friend Tess Weaver, a writer who lives in nearby Basalt, suggested we meet at the Big Wrap for lunch, where her chicken pesto and my chicken Caesar — both as generous as the business name implies — cost $11 each.

“Most of my dates with friends are hikes, bike rides or river activities,” she said, as we sat at a public table on shady Cooper Avenue and discussed spots to stage B.Y.O. après-sport picnics. “You meet people to do free things.”

One considerable trickle-down benefit to the largess for which Aspen is famed is that most of its major cultural attractions are free, including the Aspen Art Museum. A few blocks from the ski hill, I toured the contemporary exhibitions of French sculpture and German paintings before reaching the tranquil Rooftop Café, where a pick-me-up cappuccino cost $4.

Aspen’s reputation as a cultural destination began after the Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke visited in the 1940s and envisioned the former mining town as a gathering place for artists, thinkers and leaders, an inspiration that would spawn the nonprofit Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School. In 1946, he lured the artist and designer Herbert Bayer, who had studied and taught at the influential Bauhaus in Germany, to Aspen, where Bayer would design everything from Modernist homes to the Aspen leaf logo originally used by the local ski company.

Bayer’s prolific work in textiles, book graphics and more is the subject of the year-old Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies (free). A six-minute bike ride from downtown, the museum borders the 40-acre Aspen Institute grounds, which Bayer also designed. After an hour in the museum, I spent another outside with a free online guide from the Aspen Meadows resort, seeking out marble sculptures, earthworks and a topographic mural by the artist.

Next door, in a giant tent, caterers were preparing for a concert from the Aspen Music Festival, an eight-week summer series devoted to classical music and opera (through Aug. 20). Headlining performances by the opera singer Renée Fleming and other stars start at $75, but the calendar is loaded with free events, often performed by some of the school’s more than 400 students (alumni include the violinist Joshua Bell and the composer Philip Glass).

That evening, I took a bus to the school’s leafy campus about two miles out of town to attend a String Showcase, a free one-hour concert by violin and cello students who performed a range of music, from the French Romantic composer Ernest Chausson to the contemporary Turkish composer Fazil Say.

“The free events are important parts of what we do,” said Laura E. Smith, the festival’s marketing and communications vice president, estimating that roughly 70 percent of its programming is free. “More than a ticket sale, it’s about heart and humans and enriching the world.”

In summer, when mountain roads are free of snow, Aspen is a great base for day trips in the region, including exploring the Continental Divide on 12,095-foot Independence Pass. Extremely fit bicyclists make the roughly 20-mile ascent southeast of Aspen — gaining over 4,000 feet in elevation — but far more drive the twisting, narrow route on a seasonal stretch of Highway 82 that follows the cascading Roaring Fork River.

I hitched a ride with my sister and brother-in-law, who live in nearby Carbondale. Slushy ice still covered a pond ringed in wildflowers on the pass. Working our way back down the road, we parked below the pass to hike to Linkins Lake, a steep 1.2-mile round-trip in the Hunter-Fryingpan Wilderness for a lakeside picnic, and later wandered around the mining ghost town of Independence. At the Grottos, we waded into the icy river at a tumbling section known as the Cascades. We broke out a D.I.Y. happy hour at Devil’s Punchbowl, entertained by jumpers from surrounding cliffs launching themselves into a river pool.

To replicate this day without freeloading, I would need to rent a car (Kayak lists them from $48 a day), pack a picnic (Grateful Deli’s ham, turkey, Cheddar and Swiss, $10.50) and stock up on beer (25-ounce cans of Bud Light were recently priced at two for $6 at City Market grocery in Aspen), a roughly $65 outlay, not including gas. Rocky Mountain high: priceless.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

Pianist Nicolas Hodges Adapts to Life With Parkinson’s

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In the fall of 2018, the pianist Nicolas Hodges noticed his body shaking. He brought it up at a routine doctor’s appointment in Tübingen, Germany, where he lives. The doctor said it was probably stress, but recommended that he make an appointment with a neurologist.

Hodges didn’t make that appointment right away. But then, in January 2019, the shaking caused him to play a wrong note during a performance.

“It became instantly clear that I had to find out what was going on,” he said.

Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical music lover, observed Hodges performing a few minor physical tasks — walking across a room, undressing and dressing — before he sent him for a series of tests that confirmed Hodges had Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Schreiber estimated that Hodges had been performing with Parkinson’s for three years.

Hodges, 53, is a leading interpreter of contemporary classical music. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has premiered and recorded works by many important composers of this century, and the last. Recently, his symptoms have forced him to reduce and prioritize his performing commitments.

The worst symptoms, which rarely occur, can leave him feeling, he said, as if he “just couldn’t play the piano.” But the diagnosis has also strengthened his dedication to his artistry and the contemporary repertoire.

Physical limits have forced Hodges to make “aesthetic decisions,” he said, to select what music to commission and to perform with greater rigor. The diagnosis has “made me try to focus even more on what multiple contradictory things are most important to me.”

Hodges has formidable technique and an ability to make the form of even highly complex pieces clearly audible. His tone color on the piano can shift from vinegary to supple in seconds. He is strikingly adaptable to the widely divergent visions of various contemporary composers. In John Adams’s “China Gates” (1977), Hodges has combined rhythmic propulsion with tiptoe delicacy. In Brian Ferneyhough’s opera “Shadowtime” (2004), he tackled a prismatically virtuosic solo while asking enigmatic questions out loud, like “What is the cube root of a counterfactual?” In Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concerto (2014), he faced off against a video projection of himself at a smashed grand piano.

In 2020, Hodges recorded “A Bag of Bagatelles,” which wove together works by Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, a close collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that animate the music of two composers centuries apart. Looking back, Hodges realized that he had recorded the album with untreated Parkinson’s disease.

HODGES WAS BORN in London in 1970. His father was a studio manager at the BBC who later worked in computing, and his mother was a professional opera singer. Hodges began playing the piano at age 6 and composing at 9. Among his early pieces was the first scene of an opera based on the Perseus myth.

Hodges attended elementary school at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, where he took lessons on the viola, the oboe, the harpsichord and the organ, in addition to the piano. He sang in the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, performing works like Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Festival Hall under Simon Rattle.

“We were woken up earlier than the rest of the school to practice,” Hodges said. The students who didn’t play music “got half an hour more sleep than I did the whole of my childhood.”

For secondary school, Hodges went to Winchester College, in Hampshire, where Benjamin Morison, a pianist and composer who is now a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, introduced Hodges to contemporary music by playing an LP of music by Birtwistle and Gyorgy Kurtag. Hodges and Morison performed an arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for two pianos and Pierre Boulez’s restless “Structures II” for their teachers and fellow students at Winchester, to bemused reactions.

“I remember him being very precise — and encouraging me to be precise — and extremely musical,” Morison said of Hodges in a phone interview. “He was able to make the music speak as music.”

In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with the composer Morton Feldman at the Dartington Summer School, where Feldman impressed upon him the seriousness of the experimental avant-garde. Hodges also played in a band that covered songs by the Sex Pistols and the Sisters of Mercy.

It was a heady and influential time. “I was improvising; I was listening to weird, dark, funky music, and playing Debussy,” Hodges said.

For several years, he considered pursuing composition, to the dismay of his more traditionally minded mother. At age 23, he decided to refocus on the piano. “I just was having more fun as a pianist,” he said. “Composing is too much hard work.”

As part of that decision, Hodges began studying with the pianist Sulamita Aronovsky, who had defected to Britain from the Soviet Union. A car crash shortly after the move had ended her career as a performer. “She used to say to me, whenever I would come to her lesson and complain, ‘Mr. Hodges, you have to accept everyone has these problems,’” he recalled. “‘It’s the people who get past these problems who have careers.’”

Hodges has since performed as a soloist with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — usually in contemporary repertoire and often with pieces written for him. He is a professor of piano at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and almost constantly premieres new work solo and in chamber music formations.

“All these composers that we had idolized when we were teenagers, he has subsequently commissioned pieces from,” said Morison, who remains close with Hodges. “It’s an extraordinary thrill to witness that.”

WHEN HODGES RECEIVED his diagnosis, the news came with conflicting emotions. The first, Hodges recalled, was a certain cockiness. “I’m going to be a medical miracle,” he thought to himself. “I’m going to carry on whatever happens.”

When that phase passed, Hodges felt relief. He had a clear diagnosis, and the dopamine treatments prescribed by Dr. Schreiber helped. “The medication makes it possible for me to sometimes feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges said. “When you’re suffering from something like that and you’re untreated, you feel like you’re getting old before your time, you feel like your children have worn you out — and my poor children were blamed for that.”

Hodges has had to make painful decisions while prioritizing performing commitments. Since 2012, he has played in Trio Accanto, an ensemble consisting of Hodges, the German percussionist Christian Dierstein and the Swiss saxophonist Marcus Weiss. The group has toured Europe’s major new-music festivals and recorded six albums of contemporary music together.

When Dierstein and Weiss learned of Hodges’s diagnosis, they were shaken. “We’re scared, and we are as concerned and sad as we were when we first found out,” Dierstein said in a video interview. “But it was always clear to us that we want to continue playing with Nic and that we’ll take the illness into account.”

After a period of reflection during the coronavirus pandemic, Hodges decided to withdraw from Trio Accanto. He found the logistics involved in traveling to concerts and dealing with the complex instrumental setups required by many pieces too taxing. The 2024-25 season will be Hodges’s last with the group.

Playing with Trio Accanto “was ideal chamber music for me,” Hodges said. But, he added, “Parkinson’s makes it necessary for my life to be simple.”

Hodges has also learned to structure the doses of his medication — including a dopamine inhaler, a receptor agonist patch and extended-release pills — in a way that supports his concert roster. This often requires stark sacrifices: He essentially schedules the worst of his symptoms.

In February, Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” for piano and orchestra, a work composed for him, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. A final rehearsal the afternoon of the performance meant he had to take dopamine once at 4 p.m., and again at 8 p.m.

“There might be moments when I feel like I’ve taken a bit too much,” Hodges said earlier that day, “but in the situation of playing, that’s way better than having taken too little.”

In an email, Saunders said that Hodges still plays with intensity. “His recent performance of the piano concerto ‘to an utterance’ was brilliant, and I found it deeply expressive,” she wrote. She is planning to write him an ambitious new piece she described as “a big, long solo based on the concerto.”

Seven other composers are currently at work on new piano concertos for Hodges. This spring, he recorded Betsy Jolas’s complete solo piano works and premiered a new piece by Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand in the Bottom of the Sea.” Hodges also plans to record an album with works by Debussy and contemporary composers, similar to his double portrait of Beethoven and Birtwistle.

On rare occasions, Hodges has felt he was treated differently because of his illness. One composer recently “looked straight at my hands as if they would be twisted or bleeding,” he said. But many more of his collaborators have been supportive, helping him adapt without condescension or pity.

Hodges says that his goal, now, is to adjust his career “to ensure that I have the best chance to slow the progress of the disease and thus keep playing with any qualities I might have had before Parkinson’s more or less intact.”

He knows that might not last forever. “If I should stop playing, then I hope that my friends tell me I should stop playing,” Hodges said. “But, at the moment, it’s working.”

Kamala Harris Takes on Forceful New Role in Biden’s 2024 Campaign

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In recent weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has dashed off to Florida on short notice. She sparred with the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, over how to teach slavery in schools. And she flew into Iowa to defend abortion rights while 13 Republican presidential candidates were having dinner a few miles away.

Although her words were directed at Republicans, her message was also aimed at all her doubters.

Once a rising star as a senator in California, Ms. Harris has for years been saddled by criticism of her performance as vice president. She has struggled with difficult assignments on issues such as the roots of illegal migration and the narrow path to enduring voting rights protections. Concerns about her future spread as Democrats pondered whether she would be a political liability for the ticket.

Ms. Harris’s recent moves are her latest attempt to silence those concerns and reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.

“It’s good to have her out there,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee, who added that the vice president’s decision to take on the Republican Party — assertively and in real time — was central to the campaign’s 2024 strategy.

It also keeps President Biden above the fray.

“He is still uniting the West against Russian aggression, and he’s tackling the economy and inflation,” Mr. Richmond said. “She can go highlight the accomplishments, and she can take on people like DeSantis.”

In interviews, aides and advisers acknowledge that Ms. Harris has been affected by the years of criticism. She has often approached events defensively, focusing on not making mistakes, rather than looking for opportunities to attack.

But now, galvanized by what she has described as rising extremism in the Republican Party, Ms. Harris is expanding her profile.

The tussle with Mr. DeSantis, who is struggling to break through as he campaigns to be the Republican presidential nominee, provides a glimpse into Ms. Harris’s role as something of a one-woman rapid-response operation.

When Florida last month approved an overhaul to its standards for teaching Black history, which now say middle schoolers should be taught that enslaved people developed skills that could be of personal benefit, Ms. Harris directed her staff to get her down immediately to Jacksonville, a White House official said.

She was on the ground within 24 hours, speaking to a packed audience in a historically Black neighborhood, about “extremist so-called leaders” who want to sanitize history.

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris said, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd.

Her appearance caught the eye of Mr. DeSantis.

“You clearly have no trouble ducking down to Florida on short notice,” he said in an open letter last week, accusing her of trying to score political points and inviting her to discuss the new standards.

Ms. Harris, who returned to Florida for her second trip in less than two weeks, had a swift reply.

“Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said before pausing as the crowd at an African Methodist Episcopal Church event in Orlando erupted in applause. “And I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”

The vice president’s press secretary, Kirsten Allen, said Ms. Harris would “continue to call out extremist leaders as they attempt to pull our country backward with book bans, revisionist history and barriers that make it harder for Americans to participate in our democracy.”

Despite her more public role, Ms. Harris’s approval ratings have remained stubbornly low. About 52 percent of Americans have a negative view of her, while 40 percent have a positive view, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. Mr. Biden has also had trouble with persistently low approval ratings.

But Ms. Harris connects to sections of the electorate that are not always a natural fit for Mr. Biden, including women, minority groups and younger voters. At 58, Ms. Harris is decades younger than the 80-year-old president, who would be 86 at the end of a second term.

As Ms. Harris fans out across the country, some of her longtime allies said she was showing the kind of swagger they remembered from much earlier in her career, dating back to her days as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California.

“Seeing her in this role, understanding she has a president who she reports to, it’s kind of funny to me,” said Lateefah Simon, who was hired by Ms. Harris in 2005 to lead a new program aimed at keeping first-time drug offenders out of jail.

She recalled a confident Ms. Harris walking through the office when she won re-election for district attorney in 2007, reminding each staffer that she would be the boss for another four years. Ms. Simon believes Ms. Harris is making an impact as vice president but wonders how she is adjusting to being second in command.

“I’m like, ‘Kamala with a boss?’” she said.

Ms. Harris often draws on her legal background on the campaign trail as a way to emphasize her expertise — a strategy that serves as a counterweight to Republican claims that she is incompetent.

At a recent speech on gun reform, she said she had studied autopsy photographs and had “seen with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body.”

And in July, when she made a trip to Iowa for a discussion on reproductive rights, she said that she had investigated sex crimes, so she understood that denying a woman an abortion was an “immoral” approach to survivors of rape or incest.

The timing of the trip to Iowa was no accident: As she spoke at Drake University, saying opponents of abortion in state legislatures around the country “don’t even know how women’s bodies work,” former President Donald J. Trump and a dozen of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination were in Des Moines for a G.O.P. dinner.

Her appearance came just two weeks after the state’s Republican governor signed a strict new abortion ban into law, making it illegal to have the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy. (A judge has put the ban on hold.)

Ms. Harris’s decision to go on the offensive is a notable shift.

For all of her boundary-breaking as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American to serve as vice president, she has long been known for pragmatism and, to her critics, for a defense of the status quo.

She has described herself in the past as a “pragmatic prosecutor” who owns a gun for personal safety and also believes in criminal justice reform. As vice president, she has had to appeal to broad constituencies; being seen as a moderate is a benefit at a time when conservative critics have tried to portray her as radical and out of step with the nation.

But now, with the campaign in full swing, the White House is giving Ms. Harris room to make more assertive moves against Republican opponents.

She also has been freed up to travel more, something that has been in the works since the midterm elections when Democrats held off a widely expected red wave.

Because the Senate was split evenly for the first two years of the Biden administration, Ms. Harris could never be more than 24 hours away from the Capitol when the Senate was in session in case her tiebreaking vote was needed.

With Democrats now holding a 51-to-49 edge, at least in cases when Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, votes with them, Ms. Harris has more flexibility to move. Some are hoping she continues to seize on the opportunity.

Stefanie Brown James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organization that helps elect Black officials, has urged Ms. Harris’s staff to have her out in front on affirmative action and abortion issues, in particular. She said for the past two and a half years, Ms. Harris was “a little too much in the background and not seen enough or heard enough.”

“She definitely is having a moment,” Ms. James said. But she added a note of caution, saying she hoped it would be “a sustainable moment.”

Pope discusses health, his ditched peace prayer in Fatima and LGBTQ+ Catholics in airborne briefing

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ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — Pope Francis said Sunday his recovery from his latest abdominal surgery is going well and stressed that he ditched speeches during his five-day trip to Portugal and spoke off-the-cuff not because he was tired or feeling unwell, but to better communicate with young people.

Francis was asked about his health en route home from Lisbon, where he presided over World Youth Day festival. It was his first trip since he was hospitalized in June for nine days following last-minute surgery to repair an abdominal hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue.

The trip, which came during a heat wave that sent temperatures to 40 degrees C (104F) in Lisbon, was notable because the 86-year-old pontiff deviated so often from his speeches, homilies and even prayers, which are usually drafted months in advance and crafted with specific events and audiences in mind.

One of the most notable deviations was a prayer for peace that Francis was supposed to have delivered in the Portuguese shrine of Fatima, which is famous precisely because of its century-old connection to exhortations for peace and Russia’s conversion in the aftermath of World War I.

Given Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, a papal peace prayer at Fatima was to have been one of the highlights of Francis’ visit, but also potentially problematic as the Vatican seeks to maintain relations with Moscow and the Russian Orthodox Church, which has strongly supported the Kremlin’s invasion.

Instead of pronouncing the prayer, Francis ad-libbed his speech before the statue of the Madonna and skipped the peace prayer entirely, reciting instead a Hail Mary with young disabled people. The Vatican later posted part of the prayer on the @Pontifex handle of the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Asked why, Francis insisted en route back to Rome that he had prayed silently for peace but didn’t want to give “publicity” to a public prayer.

“I prayed! I prayed! I prayed to the Madonna and I prayed for peace. I didn’t make publicity. But I prayed. And we have to continually repeat this prayer for peace.”

A Vatican official, speaking on condition he not be named, noted that Francis had originally wanted to travel to Fatima alone, with just a few gendarmes for a private visit, but relented to a proper visit. The official denied any ecclesial-diplomatic considerations entered Francis’ decision-making, suggesting instead that the omission was part of an attempt to separate Fatima’s mystical-religious value from its Soviet and World War I history.

Francis, meanwhile, said he cut short his other speeches because he realized young people “don’t have a lot of attention” and that he needed to engage them, not lecture them with lengthy, complicated discourses or homilies, he said.

“Homilies can sometimes be torture,” he said. “Bla, bla, bla.”

He said the church must come around to a new idea of homilies that are “brief and with a clear, loving message.”

On his recovery, Francis said he had the abdominal stitches removed, but that he had to wear a protective belt for two to three months to ensure the incision healed well. “My health is good,” he said.

In other comments, Francis affirmed that he included LGBTQ+ Catholics in his exhortation that “todos, todos, todos” (everyone, everyone, everyone) is welcome in the Catholic Church. The comment became something of a motto for this World Youth Day, reflective of his vision of an inclusive church, welcome to all.

“The church is mother,” he said. “Each of us finds God on his or her own path in the church. And the church is mother, and guides each one on his or her path.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

How the U.S. Was Eliminated From the Women’s World Cup, Shot by Shot

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Under an ink black Australian sky above Melbourne Rectangular Stadium, the Women’s World Cup game between the United States and Sweden on Sunday went on and on and on. For 120 minutes, it went on as the teams tried unsuccessfully to score, with nearly 28,000 fans so nervous that they could only muster a simmer of cheers. Until penalty kicks turned up the volume and decided it all.

That’s when the United States’ recent dominance in the World Cup fully ended, and the Americans were left stunned and devastated by their worst showing at the quadrennial tournament. They had arrived as the favorites after winning two consecutive championships, in 2015 and 2019. But on Sunday, in the round of 16, three missed penalty kicks and a razor-thin goal by Sweden changed their fate.

Sophia Smith, who missed an opportunity to win for the United States, had to be consoled by her teammates as she sat on the field in tears. Kelley O’Hara, in her fourth World Cup, stormed by reporters and stared straight ahead in silence after the game, moments after her penalty shot hit the right post and bounced away.

And Megan Rapinoe, the outspoken and accomplished U.S. forward who had been relegated to a reserve at this World Cup, grew teary when discussing that her international career would end with her missing a penalty kick, calling it “a sick joke.” Just a week ago, Rapinoe was asked what the team’s legacy would be if it failed to win the world title yet again. She answered, “I haven’t thought about that.”

Now she won’t forget it. Sweden won the shootout, 5-4, to eliminate the United States.

Alex Morgan, the star U.S. forward, called it “a bad dream.”

“I’m really disappointed with myself, and I wish I could have provided more with this team,” said Morgan, who was on the bench for the shootouts because she had been replaced by Rapinoe earlier. She didn’t score during the entire tournament.

Julie Ertz, who rushed back to the team after having a baby a year ago, said it was sweet to see her son in the stands after the match. “But it still hurts to lose a game like that,” she said. She walked off, wiping the wet, smeared mascara from under her eyes.

It all came apart for the United States in a flurry of 14 kicks. Here’s how they unfolded, emotions included:

Andi Sullivan, the midfielder, is up first to face Sweden’s goalkeeper, Zecira Musovic, with her teammates lined up behind her, many arm in arm. She walks over to the spot with the death stare of a gunslinger, then nails the shot into the lower left of the goal. Sullivan spins back toward her teammates and pumps a fist. The crowd finally comes alive and chants: “U-S-A! U-S-A!” U.S. 1, Sweden 0.

Fridolina Rolfo, a 5-foot-10 forward who has been on the national team for 10 years, is up first for Sweden against goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher about a month after winning the Champions League with Barcelona. She sends the ball into the right side of the net, her blond ponytail swinging behind her. She flexes her arms and opens her mouth wide to shout in celebration, and the Swedish fans, many clad in bright yellow and sitting right behind the goal, explode into cheers. U.S. 1, Sweden 1.

One of the U.S. co-captains, Lindsey Horan, has a familiar, ferocious “don’t mess with me” look on her face. It’s the look she had just before she scored the equalizer in the 1-1 tie versus the Netherlands in the group stage. It’s much tougher than the softer approach she took for much of last week with her teammates, as she encouraged the 14 World Cup rookies, one by one, to play with more confidence. The Swedish fans are booing her, competing with the U.S. cheers. But Horan is steely and delivers the ball precisely to the left side, rocketing it into the net. U.S. 2, Sweden 1.

Elin Rubensson, a midfielder who returned to soccer just two months after having a baby in 2020, evidently decides that Horan picked a wonderful place to put the ball into the net. So she sends the ball there, too — and Naeher can’t get to it. U.S. 2, Sweden 2.

Up next is Kristie Mewis, whose little sister, Sam, won the World Cup title with the United States in 2019. The elder Mewis exhales hard before she shoots with her left foot and sends the ball into the right side of the goal. The stadium starts to rumble. U.S. 3, Sweden 2.

The fans are starting to think this might never end. Nathalie Bjorn, the right back for Sweden, tries to shoot into the left corner, but the ball has other ideas. It goes flying over the goal and the Sweden fans sigh in unison. She buries her face in her hands. The momentum has changed. Peter Gerhardsson, Sweden’s coach, says after the game: “You’re just waiting. You want it to be over, and you want it to go your way.” U.S. 3, Sweden 2.

The U.S. fans go wild when Megan Rapinoe walks up. She had come in for Morgan as a substitute and was sure the ball would go straight into the back of the net, just as it had so many times before, including in the final of the 2019 World Cup. This is her final World Cup, her fourth one, after she announced in July that she would retire this year. But now, her shot isn’t even close.

She sends the ball flying over the goal. On the way back to her team, she smiles because she just can’t believe it. This is how an international career ends? She thinks she last missed a penalty shot maybe in 2018.

“That’s some dark humor, me missing,” she says after the game. “I feel like I joke too often, always in the wrong places and inappropriately, so maybe this is ha-ha at the end.” U.S. 3, Sweden 2.

Sweden’s Rebecka Blomqvist shoots and Naeher makes a superhero-like dive to knock the shot down. U.S. 3, Sweden 2.

The United States scored only four goals at this World Cup, and forward Sophia Smith scored half of them. She can win it for the U.S. team, and takes her time setting up. When she connects with the ball, it soars over the right side of the post. The win was there for the taking, and she couldn’t grab it. She buries her face in her black-gloved hands. She will not be the star today. Horan tells her later: “The best players in the world miss.” Smith explains to reporters later: “But you’ve got to remember, this is part of football. You get back up and it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt for forever.” U.S. 3, Sweden 2.

Hanna Bennison, a substitute for Sweden, has a chance to save her team from what had looked like disaster. She scores, sending her team into a frenzy. Gerhardsson says later: “Accept that you are nervous, so that being nervous doesn’t make you more nervous.” U.S. 3, Sweden 3.

There’s a rumble among U.S. fans when they see who is taking the next shot: It’s Alyssa Naeher, the goalkeeper. She has flipped the switch in her head and is now taking on Musovic, her counterpart. Her shot goes smack into the middle of the goal after Musovic guesses wrong. U.S. 4, Sweden 3.

Magdalena Eriksson, a seasoned center back, needs to score to keep Sweden alive. And she delivers to the upper right corner. Sweden 4, U.S. 4.

It’s up to Kelley O’Hara, in her fourth World Cup. She sprints to the spot. She wants to win this game and this tournament and has rallied her team to have confidence that it will do both. But her shot bounces off the right post and away along the baseline.

Sweden’s fans start to party, waving their blue-and-yellow flags and dancing. Naeher says she feels terrible for her teammates who missed: “They’ve trained for it. They’ve prepared for it. And, you know, unfortunately, those things happen. My heart hurts for them.” Sweden 4, U.S. 4.

Lina Hurtig, the forward who scored when Sweden humbled the United States at the Tokyo Olympics, can win it. She shoots toward the left side of the goal. Naeher leaps for it, hitting it once with both hands to make it fly upward. The ball goes up, and Naeher hits it again with her right arm while on the ground, stretched backward, to keep it out of the goal.

Did it go in, after all? Naeher insists she saved it. Hurtig raises her arms, and shadows the referee, Stéphanie Frappart, to make her case for a goal. The play is reviewed with cameras and tracking technology.

Then Frappart waves her arms: The game is over; it is ruled a goal. Hurtig takes off toward her teammates and the Swedish players run onto the field to celebrate.

The ball, indeed, had crossed entirely into the goal, according to the replay system. By the looks of it, the margin may be a millimeter. “I thought I had it. Unfortunately it must have just slipped in. But that’s tough. Ugh, we just lost the World Cup. It’s heartbreak,” Naeher says. Sweden 5, U.S. 4.

Ransomware Attack Disrupts Health Care in at Least Three States

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A ransomware attack this week on a California-based health care system forced some of its locations to close and left others to rely on paper records.

The system, Prospect Medical Holdings, which operates 16 hospitals and more than 165 clinics and outpatient centers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Southern California, announced the cyberattack on Thursday.

A Prospect Medical spokesman could not estimate on Saturday when services would return to normal. It was not immediately clear how many of the system’s sites were affected.

On its website, Eastern Connecticut Health Network, an affiliate of Prospect Medical, listed locations that would be closed until further notice, including a medical imaging center, an urgent care facility and an outpatient blood-draw center, among others.

CharterCARE Health Partners, a Rhode Island affiliate, said on Facebook Thursday that it had to reschedule some of its appointments and to revert to paper records. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that computers were also down at Crozer Health facilities in Delaware County.

“Prospect Medical Holdings, Inc. recently experienced a data security incident that has disrupted our operations,” the company said in a statement on Saturday. “Upon learning of this, we took our systems offline to protect them and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity specialists.”

The company said it was focused on “addressing the pressing needs of our patients as we work diligently to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.”

It did not provide details on the nature of the security breach.

Waterbury Hospital, in Waterbury, Conn., said on Saturday that it was continuing to have disruptions. It also said that some of its outpatient and diagnostic imaging services had not been available on Friday or Saturday. On Thursday, it said it was relying on paper records.

Cyberattacks on hospitals have become more common, said John Riggi, national adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association.

In 2022, One Brooklyn Health, a hospital group that serves low-income neighborhoods in New York, was hit by a cyberattack that also forced staff members to use paper records. Employees said at the time that it was a learning curve, given that most hospitals have been using electronic records since the 1990s and that some diagnostic test results were coming back slower because of the cyberattack.

CommonSpirit Health, which has more than 140 hospitals and more than 700 care sites nationwide, was the target of a cyberattack last year that led to postponed surgeries, doctor visits and other delays in care, NBC reported. And in 2020, Russian hackers launched a ransomware attack on United Health Services, which has at least 400 facilities, making it the largest attack of its kind at the time.

Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, in part because the coronavirus pandemic brought many more health care services online, Mr. Riggi said.

“We’re relying more on cloud-based services, remote third parties,” Mr. Riggi said. “So all of these things are done with good intention — ultimately to improve patient care and to save lives. But the unintended consequence of this is that it has expanded dramatically our digital attack surface.”

Hospitals and clinics typically use third parties to write code and develop the technology for these systems, so it’s imperative these third parties deliver secure technology, he said.

Owl Drowning In Backyard Swimming Pool Scooped To Safety Just In Time

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An animal rescuer on New York’s Long Island swooped in to help a drowning owl earlier this week.

“Saved!” wrote Strong Island Animal Rescue League in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

The Suffolk County nonprofit said it had received a call about an “owl that was drowning in a swimming pool” and “immediately set out” to help.

Video shows the rescue group’s president, Frankie Floridia, fishing the flailing bird or prey out of the water with a long-handled net and placing it inside a plastic tub for transportation.

News 12 Long Island reported that the bird was taken from the Commack, New York, backyard to Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown for care.

Several people who commented on the Facebook post wondered why the homeowners hadn’t scooped the struggling owl out themselves. The group responded that it doesn’t “ask questions” when someone calls for help with an animal, adding, “these people were good people who wanted help for the owl.”

Last month, a barred owl was rescued from a similar situation in a Florida swimming pool and was treated for injuries by the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife in Sanibel.

To prevent animals from drowning in swimming pools, the Humane Society of the United States recommends fencing pools and installing “water-exit” devices, like a floating ramp, that can help animals get out.

Related…

Teenager Is Charged in Killing of O’Shae Sibley at Brooklyn Gas Station

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A 17-year-old has been charged with murder in the killing of O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death on July 29 after a dispute over his dancing at a Brooklyn gas station.

Mr. Sibley, a gay man who was a professional dancer and choreographer, was returning from New Jersey to his home in Brooklyn with four friends that night when the group stopped at a gas station in the Midwood neighborhood, the police said on Saturday. As they filled up their car, they played Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album and began dancing, officials said, at which point a group of men approached and told them to stop.

“We can see on the video the heated verbal dispute quickly turns physical,” Joseph Kenny, an assistant chief at the New York Police Department’s detective bureau, said at a news conference with Mayor Eric Adams announcing the arrest.

The men yelled homophobic slurs and anti-Black statements at Mr. Sibley, who was Black, and his friends, Mr. Kenny said, all while demanding they stop dancing. Bystanders acted as “peacemakers,” and the men shouting at Mr. Sibley’s group began to disperse, Mr. Kenny said — except for the defendant.

Video of the encounter, which lasted about four minutes, shows the teenager stabbing Mr. Sibley once in the chest, “damaging his heart,” Mr. Kenny said. A witness said the teenager then jumped into a Toyota Highlander that sped off. Mr. Sibley was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead that night.

The teenager, whom the police did not name, lives in Brooklyn and was identified by the police earlier this week using video and by working with other city agencies, Mr. Kenny said. The suspect turned himself in through an arrangement with his lawyer, Mr. Kenny added. He has been charged with second-degree murder, which has been charged as a hate crime, and with criminal possession of a weapon.

At the news conference, Mr. Adams said that Mr. Sibley’s family had been affected by something that “clearly” was a hate crime.

“This is a city where you are free to express yourself,” Mr. Adams said. “And that expression should never end with any form of violence.”

For many people, the death of Mr. Sibley — whom friends described as friendly, fun-loving and passionate about his art — was a shocking and violent reminder of the discrimination L.G.B.T.Q. people face. It inspired an outpouring of grief over several days.

On Thursday evening, about 80 mourners gathered at the Stonewall Inn, the Greenwich Village bar known as the cradle of the gay rights movement. The next night, at an event at the Midwood Mobil station where Mr. Sibley was killed, attendees were encouraged to “vogue as an act of resistance” — a reference to the style of dance performed by Mr. Sibley and his friends. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village announced it would hold a memorial on Saturday evening. Public figures have also paid tribute: On Beyoncé’s website, “Rest in Power O’Shae Sibley” was prominently displayed against a black backdrop.

Summy Ullah, a 32-year-old gas station attendant who witnessed the confrontation, said one of the men who approached Mr. Sibley and his friends had said: “I’m Muslim. I don’t want this here.”

At the news conference on Saturday, flanked by leaders from the city’s gay and Muslim communities, Mr. Adams emphasized that Mr. Sibley’s killing was not evidence of hatred directed at L.G.B.T.Q. people by Muslims in New York, and spoke about how both groups have been victims of hate. The two communities “stand united against fighting any form of hate in this city,” he said.

Lee Soulja Simmons, executive director of the NYC Center For Black Pride, said he met Mr. Sibley about six years ago when Mr. Sibley was performing in an Off Broadway show about Black pride.

Mr. Simmons said that Black gay New Yorkers were wrestling with his death, while also living with the specter of hate crimes and discrimination being directed at them because of their identities.

Mr. Sibley “was doing nothing more but vogueing and dancing here,” he added. “He did not deserve to die in that way.”

Maria Cramer, Wesley Parnell and Erin Nolan contributed reporting.

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