Ukraine’s military used American-made ballistic missiles on Tuesday to strike into Russia for the first time, according to senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials, just days after President Biden gave permission to do so in what amounted to a major shift of American policy.

The pre-dawn attack struck an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of southwestern Russia, Ukrainian officials said. Russia’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement that Kyiv used six ballistic missiles known as the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. A senior American official and a senior Ukrainian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, confirmed that ATACMS were used.

The strike represented a demonstration of force for Ukraine as it tries to show Western allies that providing more powerful and sophisticated weapons will pay off — by degrading Russia’s forces and bolstering Ukraine’s prospects in the war.

Officials in Kyiv had pleaded for months for permission to use ATACMS to strike military targets deeper inside Russia before the Biden administration relented and gave its assent. The authorization came just months before the return to office of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has said he will seek a quick end to the war in Ukraine.

His election has cast uncertainty over whether the U.S. will maintain the robust military support it has provided Ukraine under Mr. Biden, or whether Mr. Trump might take a different approach.

The addition of up to 10,000 North Korean troops to Moscow’s war effort this fall appeared to be what persuaded the Biden administration to shift its stance on ATACMS. The United States and its allies viewed their arrival as an escalation.

Andrii Kovalenko, a member of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that Tuesday’s strike in Bryansk hit warehouses housing “artillery ammunition, including North Korean ammunition for their systems.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed that five of the ATACMS missiles were shot down and another was damaged, saying that falling fragments caused a fire at a military facility but that there were no casualties.

The attack came on the same day President Vladimir V. Putin lowered Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, a long-planned move whose timing appeared aimed at showing the Kremlin could respond aggressively to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with American long-range missiles.

The Kremlin has throughout the war used the threat of deploying its nuclear arsenal to try to deter the West from providing more robust military support to Ukraine. On Monday, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said President Biden’s decision about the U.S.-provided long-range missiles “escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Lara Jakes from Rome.

Amos Hochstein, a top U.S. envoy to the Middle East, arrived in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, on Tuesday as efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah appeared to be intensifying.

Mr. Hochstein’s visit signaled that the United States was continuing to push for a truce in the conflict, which has further destabilized a region that had already been put on edge by Israel’s war in Gaza.

After landing in Lebanon, Mr. Hochstein met with Nabih Berri, the Lebanese Parliament speaker who is a key interlocutor between the United States and Hezbollah, Lebanese state media reported.

“We have a real opportunity to bring this conflict to an end,” Mr. Hochstein said in comments to reporters after the meeting, adding that gaps between both parties had narrowed in discussions in recent weeks. “This is a moment of decision making,” he said.

Mr. Hochstein’s visit to the region comes on the heels of the third instance of Israeli airstrikes in central Beirut in two days. The strike, which hit the Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood on Monday evening, killed at least five people and injured 24 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

The Israeli military declined to comment on two of the three strikes, only confirming one and saying that it had targeted Mohammed Afif, the head of Hezbollah’s media office, who was killed. Over the past few days, Hezbollah has launched dozens of rocket and drone attacks at Israel.

The strikes in Beirut were the first to hit the city center in weeks. Over the past week, Israel has conducted intense bombardment of the Dahiya, an area just south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway.

President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday lowered Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, a long-planned move whose timing appeared designed to show the Kremlin could respond aggressively to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with American long-range missiles.

The decree signed by Mr. Putin implemented a revised version of Russia’s nuclear doctrine that Mr. Putin described in televised remarks in September. But the timing was clearly meant to send a message, coming just two days after the news that President Biden had authorized the use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia.

Asked whether Russia could respond with nuclear weapons to such strikes, Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, repeated the new doctrine’s language that Russia “reserves the right” to use such weapons to respond to a conventional-weapons attack that creates a “critical threat” to its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defense later announced that Kyiv had used the long-range ballistic missiles known as the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, in a pre-dawn attack on an ammunition depot in southwestern Russia. A senior American and a senior Ukrainian official, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, confirmed that ATACMS were used.

The new doctrine asserts that Russia could use nuclear arms in the event of an attack by a nation backed by a nuclear power. The doctrine’s publication on Tuesday appeared to be the latest suggestion from the Kremlin that Russia could use nuclear weapons to respond to attacks by Ukraine carried out with American support, and that the response could be directed against American facilities as well as Ukraine itself.

“Aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies by any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack,” the document says.

Mr. Peskov, speaking at his daily conference call with reporters, pointed to this section of the revised doctrine, saying, “this is also a very important paragraph.”

Russia’s previous doctrine said its nuclear deterrence was directed mainly against countries and alliances that have nuclear weapons. And it had a higher threshold for the kind of conventional attack that could trigger nuclear use, specifying that such an attack must threaten “the very existence of the state.”

“Nuclear deterrence is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies,” Mr. Peskov said.

Still, for all the strident rhetoric, the war in Ukraine largely appears to be going Mr. Putin’s way — and Western officials have previously said that they would be most worried about Moscow’s using nuclear weapons if the Russian military is on its back foot.

On the battlefield, Russian forces are advancing in eastern Ukraine, while Kyiv struggles with recruitment and morale. And in geopolitics, Mr. Putin has also been making gains: his phone call last week with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany broke two years of diplomatic isolation by the biggest Western countries, while the election of Donald J. Trump as incoming president of the United States has raised hopes in Russia of a Ukraine peace deal on the Kremlin’s terms.

From the first day of his invasion in February 2022, Mr. Putin has been trying to use the threat of Russia’s enormous nuclear arsenal to deter Western military aid to Ukraine. He has had only limited success, with the United States leading a coalition that has dispatched tens of billions of dollars’ worth of modern tanks, artillery systems and missiles.

But Mr. Putin has sought to draw a new red line at the possibility of Ukraine’s using Western missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory. To the frustration of Ukrainian officials, President Biden long refused, given what American officials said was the risk of a violent response by Mr. Putin and the limited impact that the use of those missiles could have on the battlefield.

But Mr. Biden changed course recently after Russia’s surprise decision to bring North Korean troops into the fight, American officials said.

In September, Mr. Putin warned that if the United States and its allies permitted Ukraine to fire missiles deeper into Russia, they would put his country “at war” with NATO.

In the lead-up to Mr. Biden’s decision, some American officials said they feared that Ukraine’s use of the missiles across the border could prompt Mr. Putin to retaliate with force against the United States and its coalition partners. Other American officials said they thought those fears were overblown.

In response to Mr. Biden’s recent decision, Russian officials have warned in some of their strongest statements yet about the risk of nuclear war.

On Tuesday, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament, said that Mr. Biden “will slam the lid of his own coffin and drag many, many more people with him.”

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the outspoken former Russian president and vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s security council, said in a social media post that under the new nuclear doctrine, the use of missiles provided by NATO countries in attacks by Ukraine against Russia “can now be qualified as an attack on Russia” by NATO nations.

Mr. Medvedev, whose threats often go beyond the Kremlin’s official pronouncements, added: “In this case, the right arises to launch a retaliatory strike with weapons of mass destruction against Kyiv and the main NATO facilities, wherever they are.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

For more than 10 weeks, Gisèle Pelicot has sat in a courtroom in Avignon, France, quietly listening to the explanations of 50 men, including her now ex-husband, charged with raping, sexually assaulting or attempting to rape her while she was in an unconscious state, having been drugged by her husband.

She has heard most say that they were not guilty — that they went to her house lured by her husband, believing they were going for a threesome that she had consented to. She has heard some say they were trapped, played like checker pieces. She has heard some say they believe that he had drugged them, too.

Ms. Pelicot stayed in the courtroom while grim videos that her husband took of those encounters were played — revealing the men, sitting on benches nearby, touching her inert body and engaging in sexual acts, with her husband in the background egging them on, often with vulgar words. (Ms. Pelicot divorced him just before the trial began.)

On Tuesday, a day before closing statements were set to begin, she was given the chance to address the court one last time.

She was tired, she said, standing small and poised at the microphone.

“It’s difficult for me to hear that it’s basically banal to have raped Madame Pelicot,” she said, referring to herself. “This is a trial of cowardice.”

The trial of 51 men — one is on the run and being tried in absentia — has profoundly shaken the country since it began in September. Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to crushing sleeping pills into his wife’s food and drink for almost a decade and then inviting strangers he met mostly on the internet to come to the house they had rented for retirement in southern France to join him in raping her.

The accused are a cross-section of middle- and working-class men — tradesmen, firefighters, truck drivers, a journalist, a nurse. They range in age from 26 to 74. Most live close to Mazan, the town that the Pelicots retired to in 2013. Many are married or in committed relationships. Most have children. The court has heard from their wives, their parents, their friends and children, who mostly have said they are wonderful, kind people.

About 15 of them, including Mr. Pelicot, have pleaded guilty. Mr. Pelicot has repeatedly insisted that the others were perfectly aware of what was going on.

Ms. Pelicot has told the court that the couple met as teenagers and mostly lived together happily for 50 years. She had no idea that he had been drugging her, though she suffered frightening symptoms including extended blackouts. She had visited many doctors, fearing that she had a brain tumor or Alzheimer’s disease.

The lawyers who pack the court alongside their clients questioned Ms. Pelicot for the last time on Tuesday and tested their theories of defense.

One noted that she had been under her husband’s control, steered and tricked for at least a decade. So how could she not think it was possible that he had tricked and controlled these men?

“He drugged me,” said Ms. Pelicot, 71. “He did not manipulate me daily. You think I would have stayed with a man who manipulated me for 50 years?”

Another lawyer said Ms. Pelicot seemed to have more sympathy for her ex-husband than the other accused. She posited that Ms. Pelicot was still under her husband’s control.

“That’s your analysis,” Ms. Pelicot said calmly. She added, “All my life, I have been a very positive person. I will keep with me the best of this man.”

Ms. Pelicot said she had been working through her anger and sorrow in sessions with a psychiatrist, as well as long walks, talking to her friends and eating chocolate.

Her ex-husband had always driven her to her medical appointments, searching for the cause of her health issues that, ultimately, he was causing. Ms. Pelicot had described those trips as support. One lawyer pointed out that it was another form of control and manipulation, with an aim to ensure that his secret was not discovered.

“It could be both at the same time,” she responded. “I always took it as an act of kindness. It could also have been a way for him to ensure they didn’t discover the facts.”

Ms. Pelicot recognized that her ex-husband was the “orchestra conductor” and that it was not only her family that had been destroyed in the fallout but also the families of the 50 other accused men. But while they might have been manipulated to get them to the house, once the men were in the bedroom and saw her state, they should have left and called the police, she said.

“I feel anger against those who are behind me who not for one moment thought of reporting it,” she said. “Not a single one reported it. It raises some real questions.”

Since she made the rare decision of opening the trial to the public, Ms. Pelicot has become a feminist hero. While her children and grandchildren had been ashamed of their name at the beginning of the trial, Ms. Pelicot said she believed they were now proud.

“Today I am known around the world, whether I like it or not,” she said. “People will remember Madame Pelicot, much less Monsieur Pelicot.”

As for her ex-husband, “some think I have forgiven him,” she said, “I will never forgive him. The things he did to me are unforgivable.”

They have had the kind of career most bands can only dream of: songs that have been downloaded more than a billion times, 11 million records sold and thousands of fans in dozens of cities.

But if you have never lived in Denmark or Asia, you may never have heard of Michael Learns to Rock.

The Danish soft rock band broke through in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and other parts of Asia in the 1990s. They sang in English about love, longing and loss — think Chicago, but the ballad years — and created a soundtrack for a generation of Asian youth.

Thirty years on, their songs remain karaoke staples in this part of the world. They also have a younger audience — one of their biggest hits, “Take Me To Your Heart,” became a dance challenge on TikTok. They have toured regularly in the region, playing a sold-out concert hall in Medan, the third-largest city in Indonesia, last week as part of an eight-stop Asia tour. A few days earlier, they were in Manila, making concertgoers misty-eyed with their greatest hits.

There, Jascha Richter, the 61-year-old lead singer, spoke to the crowd of 7,500 fans about the band’s journey.

“Since we came to Asia for the first time in ’94, we really felt a special connection to you guys in spite of the distance to Scandinavia, and in spite of the many different cultures here in Asia,” he said. “You really took us to your hearts.”

The audience roared.

“Their music has inspired me from childhood to now,” said Richel Rose Dupit, 39, the president of the band’s fan club in the Philippines, who said they were the only act she’d ever seen live.

Like her, I grew up listening to Michael Learns to Rock, as a child in Singapore. I was reminded of their staying power last year in Indonesia, when I heard a taxi driver listening to their music. The following week, I was on a farm in Bangkok where “Take Me To Your Heart” was blaring. I conducted an informal poll on X: Why do so many people in Southeast Asia love Michael Learns to Rock?

I received an outpouring of explanations. Karaoke. The use of simple lyrics. The easy melodies. Many wanted to share what the band meant to them. An Indonesian man told me that one smash hit, “That’s Why You Go Away,” had been the soundtrack for all his class reunions.

“The true story is really that Asia picked us,” Mr. Richter said.

The band started out in 1988 as a group of high-school buddies in Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark. They came up with their name — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Michael Jackson — when they were entering a rock competition.

Initially, they set their sights on England and the United States. But in England, they were quickly rebuffed. Recording companies thought their lyrics were too simple, recalled Mikkel Lentz, the guitarist.

Consider the chorus of “The Actor,” a track from their self-titled debut album that was a hit in Scandinavia:

I’m not an actor,
I’m not a star,
And I don’t even have my own car,
But I’m hoping so much you’ll stay,
That you will love me anyway

“That is not a song that Blur or Oasis would sing,” Mr. Lentz, 55, said.

The band’s three members — originally there were four — describe their success in Asia as a series of lucky twists. They landed a record deal in Los Angeles, but the record company went bankrupt. Their second album tanked in Denmark because grunge was in and pop and soft rock were out.

Then, they received a fax telling them that “The Actor” was a No. 1 hit in Indonesia.

“We had to find a map and see: ‘Where is Indonesia?’” recalled Kare Wanscher, the 55-year-old drummer. “You know, none of us had ever been to Asia before. We were young kids and it was just a very big surprise.”

Agus Syarif Hidayat, an executive at Aquarius Musikindo, a record company in Jakarta, played a part in their success. Short of new material while competitors were releasing music from the likes of Madonna and Bon Jovi, he turned to Michael Learns to Rock.

“When I heard ‘The Actor,’ the lyrics really got me,” he said. “I was a bachelor at that time, so I could relate — my salary was still minimal, I didn’t have a car and I couldn’t treat my girlfriend to an expensive restaurant.”

Soon, word spread to Singapore and Malaysia. By the time the band started their first Asia tour in 1994, they were stars.

In Bangkok, their concert was stopped midway through because so many fans, about 12,000, had turned up that the authorities feared the venue’s floor would give way. In Hanoi, the riot police were deployed because fans duped by fake tickets had climbed in through the windows and the roof.

At a time when few Western acts, with the exception of superstars like Michael Jackson, traveled to the continent to perform, the band was a revelation — and they returned year after year.

They were the first international act to perform in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and they have played in places as remote as Papua New Guinea.

“I really think we won the lottery with Asia,” said Mr. Lentz. “All our Danish colleagues, they don’t make it outside of Denmark.”

Asked to describe their finances, Mr. Wanscher noted the high tax rates in Scandinavia and said: “We live very comfortably in a very expensive part of the world.”

Many fans said they felt a shared connection to the band with their parents.

In Manila, Orlando Aton, 32, said his late father, who delivered pizzas in Saudi Arabia, had introduced him to Michael Learns to Rock. Listening to their music, Mr. Aton said, is “like my father and me ‘fanboying’ together.”

In Medan, Maria Juli also gave credit to her parents. She cried as she sang along with the band while thinking of her late mother.

“Tonight, it truly brought back old memories,” said Ms. Maria, 32, a kindergarten teacher who came with her two aunts to the concert. “Our voices are hoarse.”

Camille Elemia contributed reporting from Manila, Rin Hindryati from Medan and Hasya Nindita from Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The greatest trick that “Raymond Lloyd” may ever have performed was a complex illusion: Convincing an elite, male-only society of magicians that he existed.

That performance won Mr. Lloyd acceptance into the society, The Magic Circle, in 1991. But after revealing a few months later that he was in fact a she, the performer was ousted from the club.

Now, The Magic Circle wants her back and has embarked on a quest to solve what turned out to be a disappearing act — and make amends.

“I would love to look her in the eyes and say, on behalf of the other magicians that we have, ‘You’re absolutely welcome,’” said Marvin Berglas, the president of the society.

Based in London, the Magic Circle was founded in 1905 and lists celebrity illusionists David Copperfield and Criss Angel among its honorary members. For decades, only male magicians were able to join — until two women set out to call their bluff.

“I always wanted to be first lady in the Magic Circle,” one of them, Jenny Winstanley, told the Canadian broadcaster CBC in 1991. “Really wanted to prove that women are as good as men.”

But Ms. Winstanley was already regionally known as a magician at the time, according to Mr. Berglas. That could help explain why she turned to a young actress who went by the name Sophie Lloyd for help — and why Ms. Lloyd said she agreed to do it.

“I did it for Jenny,” Ms. Lloyd explained in the same interview. “She thought that it was so unfair that lady magicians couldn’t get into The Circle.”

The women told the CBC that they had spent two years building the Raymond Lloyd character. Ms. Winstanley said she taught the actress magic tricks, and they found ways to disguise what Ms. Lloyd described as her already boyish frame.

The test to gain membership in The Magic Circle, Ms. Lloyd told CBC, involved performing a 20-minute show with tricks and spending over an hour speaking with her examiner, a magician. She passed, earning full membership in March 1991, according to The Magic Circle.

Ms. Lloyd kept up the ruse of being Raymond until The Magic Circle started admitting female members in October that year. Then the women went to the press to reveal their trick.

The Magic Circle, apparently angered about being hoodwinked, voided the membership of “Raymond Lloyd” — and the story “got swept under the carpet,” according to Mr. Berglas.

Stuart Scott said that when he joined The Magic Circle about 20 years ago, he remembered hearing a vague story about a woman trying to sneak into the society.

“It was just one of those rumors. I didn’t think much of it,” Mr. Scott, who works as a deception consultant, said in an interview. “No one ever substantiated it.”

Years later during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Scott said, he was researching the history of magic in London when he stumbled upon two books about The Magic Circle that both briefly referenced the incident.

“I thought, there has to be more to it than this,” he said. So he started digging, rooting out archival minutes from the society’s meetings and uncovering more about the ruse.

Mr. Scott integrated his findings into the tours he gives at The Magic Circle’s London headquarters, according to Laura London, the first woman to serve as chair of the society. Ms. London said when she first caught wind of the story about two months ago, she started poring through archives herself in hopes of tracking Ms. Lloyd down.

“I think her story is inspiring and it’s an important one to tell,” Ms. London said. “That there are brave women out there that do extraordinary things to prove that they can do things in an unjust world. Such as, in her case, to do magic as good as the guys.”

Professional women in magic are still fighting for recognition three decades after Ms. Lloyd’s feat. And only 5 percent of The Magic Circle’s approximately 1,700 current members are women.

The Magic Circle uncovered articles from the late 1990s that referenced Ms. Lloyd using magic to counteract bullying in schools — but no trace beyond that.

Ms. Winstanley, her partner in the ruse, died in 2004. So The Magic Circle reached out to Ms. Winstanley’s son, Nick Allen. But he said he did not know how to contact Ms. Lloyd — and thought her first name might have actually been Sue.

With little to go on, The Magic Circle turned to the media. But numerous articles in Britain have failed to find her.

Ms. London said that more than anything, she would like to find Ms. Lloyd to apologize.

“It’s important for us to find a way to give her a way to give her some closure on it, if she wants it,” she explained.

Whether Ms. Lloyd would take The Circle up on their offer remains to be seen.

“To be honest,” she said in her CBC interview, “I’m not into magic.”