President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are speaking on Tuesday as Washington pushes for a cease-fire in Ukraine. Mr. Trump said the topics would include power plants and “dividing up” Ukrainian assets.

The call — which the White House said began at around 10 a.m. Eastern — is the first known conversation between the two leaders since Ukraine agreed to support a U.S.-backed monthlong cease-fire, as long as Russia does the same. While Mr. Trump has stated his desire to broker a truce as quickly as possible, Mr. Putin seems to be seeking more concessions.

“Many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to, but much remains,” Mr. Trump wrote on Monday on Truth Social, his social media platform. He added that the war “must end NOW,” and said he was looking forward to the call with Mr. Putin.

Before the call, Mr. Putin projected confidence in a speech to Russian businesspeople. He said Western businesses that left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and now wish to return would not be able to reacquire their assets for modest sums and would face Russian regulatory scrutiny.

The cease-fire proposal on the table

A week ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the U.S. national security adviser, sat down for talks in Saudi Arabia with a delegation led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.

After more than eight hours of talks, the United States and Ukraine issued a joint statement saying that Kyiv would support the Trump administration’s proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia, subject to Russia’s approval. The United States said it would immediately resume providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, which the Trump administration had suspended after an explosive U.S.-Ukraine meeting at the White House.

The United States and Ukraine also agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” a deal to develop Ukraine’s critical mineral resources.

Russia’s stance

Mr. Putin has not yet agreed to halt the war that Russia began more than three years ago. He has said the idea for a cease-fire was “the right one and we definitely support it,” but laid out numerous conditions that could delay or derail any truce. That includes demands that Ukraine cease mobilizing new soldiers, training troops or importing weapons for the duration of any pause in fighting.

Mr. Putin also said that Russia would continue to insist on a peace deal that addressed the “original causes” of the war — signaling that he will not stop fighting until he extracts a pledge that Ukraine will not join NATO and that the alliance will reduce its presence in Central and Eastern Europe.

“There are questions that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to talk them through with our American colleagues and partners,” he told a news conference on Thursday, just before meeting with Steve Witkoff, who is Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East but has also been playing a role in the peace talks over Ukraine.

On Sunday, Mr. Witkoff told CNN that his meeting with Mr. Putin had lasted three to four hours. While he declined to share the specifics of their conversation, he said it went well and that the two sides had “narrowed the differences between them.”

The cease-fire proposal could create tension between Mr. Putin’s desires for a far-reaching victory in Ukraine and for close ties with Mr. Trump.

Conversation topics

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, declined to say what topics were on the agenda for the call.

Mr. Trump said on Sunday night that he expected to discuss territorial issues with Mr. Putin as well as the fate of Ukrainian power plants. He also noted that there had already been discussions about “dividing up certain assets.”

“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Mr. Trump said. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

Mr. Trump did not elaborate on what he meant by assets or power plants, but his comments came on the same day Mr. Witkoff mentioned a “nuclear reactor” in an interview with CBS News.

That appeared be a reference to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia seized early in the war and still controls. The six-reactor plant is Europe’s largest, and its proximity to frontline fighting has long raised concerns about the risk of a radiological disaster.

It was not immediately clear, though, whether any discussion about the power plant would focus on Russia giving it up — or finding a way to keep it under any truce.

The power plant sits near the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia has officially annexed despite controlling only part of its territory. Surrendering it would mean ceding territory Russia considers its own. It would also give Kyiv’s troops a foothold in a Russian-controlled area that has been relatively protected from Ukrainian attacks thanks to the natural barrier of the large Dnipro River.

At the same time, energy experts say, the nuclear plant is in poor condition after three years of war and restoring full operations would require a lot of time and investment from Russia. That could mean Russia might see an incentive to try trading it in negotiations for something else, such as the easing of Western sanctions on the Russian economy, experts say.

State of the war

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has accused Mr. Putin of stalling so that Russia’s army can advance on the battlefield and strengthen his hand in cease-fire talks.

Moscow’s push to drive out Ukrainian troops from most of the Kursk region of Russia in recent days has deprived Kyiv of an important bargaining chip in any potential negotiations.

The moves in Kursk give Russia an opportunity to show Mr. Trump that it holds the momentum on the battlefield. And battlefield maps compiled by both Russian and Western groups analyzing combat footage and satellite images show that Russian forces have already crossed into Ukraine’s Sumy region from Kursk, in what analysts say may be an effort to flank and encircle the remaining Ukrainian troops in Kursk or open a new front in the war.

Mr. Zelensky has accused Russia to preparing to mount a larger offensive into the Sumy region, which is home to hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite the setbacks in Kursk, Kyiv’s forces have stalled a Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine and started to win back small patches of land, according to military analysts and Ukrainian soldiers. Military analysts, however, have been debating whether, after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades are exhausted or are regrouping for a renewed push.

Recent U.S.-Ukraine tensions

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has realigned American foreign policy seemingly in Russia’s favor — including by echoing a Kremlin talking point that blamed Kyiv for starting the war.

That raised alarm in Ukraine about whether Mr. Trump would taper the flow of U.S. military assistance. Strain in the relationship burst into public view on Feb. 28, when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, saying he was not grateful enough for U.S. support.

Since then, Ukraine has sought to smooth over relations with the Trump administration, and Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly expressed gratitude for American assistance.

Concessions and guarantees

Mr. Rubio has said that Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia had taken since 2014 as part of any agreement to end the war. But he also said that it would be imperative in talks with Moscow to determine what Russia was willing to concede.

Before agreeing to the cease-fire proposal, Ukraine had insisted that any cease-fire include security guarantees, but there has been no indication since that any such guarantees would be provided before any interim cease-fire would take effect.

European allies have pledged further support to Kyiv. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain has said he would continue pressing Mr. Trump for American security guarantees — a lobbying effort that he shares with President Emmanuel Macron of France. Britain and France have already pledged to contribute troops to a peacekeeping force and are trying to enlist other countries across Europe to do the same.

The day her father and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her mother in a trial that had gripped France was an acute personal tragedy to Caroline Darian.

She escaped the Avignon courthouse and was enveloped in a giant crowd of women blocking traffic and chanting their love and gratitude for her and her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who had become a feminist icon in France for insisting the trial against her husband and 50 other men be public and refusing to feel ashamed as a rape victim.

But Ms. Darian did not hear them. She was overwhelmed by despair.

The trial had ended and she hadn’t gotten the answers she’d hoped for from her father, Dominique Pelicot, who she believes drugged and raped her, too.

“Dominique was not tried for what he did to his daughter,” Ms. Darian, 46, said in a recent interview over lunch at a Parisian restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “He wasn’t even confronted adequately for what he did to his daughter.”

The trial that led to the convictions of 51 men forensically inspected the horror Mr. Pelicot inflicted upon his wife over almost a decade, as he mixed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication into her drink and food and then, when she was deeply passed out, dressed her up in lingerie and invited strangers to come over and join him in raping her while he took photos and filmed.

But the suspicions of his only daughter, Caroline, were little more than a sidelight of the trial. Instead of coming away with a degree of healing, Ms. Darian felt deeply wounded.

“My case, in that court, it was like it didn’t exist,” said Ms. Darian, who uses a pen name.

“It was terrible,” she said.

This month she filed her own police complaint against her father for rape and sexual assault. It coincided with the publication of Ms. Darian’s second book about her father’s crimes and the cataclysmic impact they’ve had on her life.

Her first book, a raw journal documenting the intimate horror she suffered in the year after her father’s arrest, is being released in the United States on Tuesday as “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.” She agreed to an interview with The New York Times in conjunction with its publication.

At the heart of her case are two intimate photos that her father had erased but that forensic investigators managed to retrieve from Mr. Pelicot’s electronics. Both capture Ms. Darian asleep in bed, with the lights on and the covers pulled back to reveal her beige underwear.

The underwear, Ms. Darian told the court, was not hers. She said that she had no recollection of the photos being taken and that she was a light sleeper. She believes that she, too, was drugged, and that her father used the same modus operandi on her as he had on her mother.

During the trial, Mr. Pelicot at first denied having taken the photos and said he did not believe they were of his daughter. Later, he said he had taken them because he was being blackmailed.

Investigators also found evidence of an erased folder with the title, “My naked daughter” and photo collages of Ms. Darian and Ms. Pelicot, both naked, that Mr. Pelicot had shared with strangers online. In one exchange on Skype, he referred to his “trapped daughter.”

But when it came to his daughter, he was convicted only on charges of having taken the intimate photos without her permission.

Ms. Darian is convinced they are evidence of much more serious crimes that investigators missed or ignored, overwhelmed by her mother’s case.

Her 30-page police complaint, seen by The New York Times, includes material found by investigators though not brought up in the trial.

They include transcripts of Skype interactions Mr. Pelicot had with another user in 2020 when he had shared photo montages. After the user admired his daughter, Mr. Pelicot wrote: “It’s been more than eight years I’ve been offering her up like this. Do you want to see her when she was 30?”

Mr. Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said she had not seen the complaint yet. She noted that the general prosecutor in last year’s trial had acknowledged Ms. Darian’s grievances but had said there were not enough “objective elements” to prosecute Mr. Pelicot for them.

During the trial, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly said that he had never drugged his daughter. He denied sexually touching her or any of his children and grandchildren, the eldest of whom has also filed a police complaint that he, too, was sexually abused by Mr. Pelicot.

Before their father’s arrest, neither she nor her brothers suspected he was a sexual predator, they told the court. They were a tight-knit family, often gathering for vacations down in Provence, where Mr. and Ms. Pelicot had retired. Their parents had been together for 50 years and seemed very happy.

His arrest, and his admission to crimes against their mother, caused a sudden profound shock. Ms. Darian began suffering panic attacks. She stopped sleeping and was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.

“Until I was 41, I thought my father was a good, kind person,” Ms. Darian said. “In 2020, all our foundations as children crumbled.”

In 2019, Ms. Darian was crippled with pain from an anal tear that doctors could not explain and that required three operations, according to her police complaint. She now believes it was probably caused by her father or men he may have invited to rape her.

In addition to the police complaint for sexual abuse filed by his eldest grandson, Mr. Pelicot has also been indicted in two cold cases, involving young female real estate agents in the 1990s. The first was raped and murdered; the second managed to escape an attempted rape and took refuge in a closet.

During the trial, while Ms. Pelicot remained calm and emotionally detached, Ms. Darian was a cyclone of emotion. Anger and suffering rose off her in waves. Part way through the trial, she announced on Instagram that she was checking herself into a clinic “to be able to sleep again.”

“You are lying — you don’t have the courage to tell the truth,” she hollered near the end of the trial, when her father once again denied having abused her. “You will die with your lies, alone with your lies.”

Remembering that day months later over lunch, Ms. Darian broke into tears. Her father’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence and explain it, she said, was “the ultimate betrayal.”

“He owed me the truth,” she said. “I am not just any victim. I was his daughter.”

Ms. Darian has lost not just her father, but her mother, too. The two are no longer speaking, she said. While she is sure her father abused her, her mother was more equivocal. When asked in court, she responded only that “it could not be ruled out.”

To Ms. Darian, it felt like abandonment.

“My relationship with my mother will never be the same again,” she said.

Gisèle Pelicot has refused all interview requests. One of her lawyers says said she won’t speak publicly before appeals of the convictions are heard, if ever.

Ms. Darian’s younger brother, Florian Pelicot, 38, said he believed their mother showed enormous strength in facing the horrors her husband, and dozens of other men, inflicted upon her. Opening her mind to his sister’s accusations, he thinks, “would have made her collapse.”

“You can’t save yourself and rebuild yourself and also help your children to rebuild themselves too,” he said.

Florian Pelicot emerged from the trial with his own deep wounds: His 18-year marriage ended, and he has started the process of getting a paternity test after his father raised doubts he was his son during one of his pretrial interviews with the investigating judge, he said.

Near the end of the trial, Ms. Darian said she darted across the courtroom to the glass box for the accused during a recess for a quick last private word with the man who had been her father.

She told him that their relationship was over, she said, but that her pursuit of the truth was not.

“I’ll go all the way for my personal dignity,” she said in the interview. “Because I know I’m not wrong. I know that he must have done some very serious things. And I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

The guards wore name tags that read “Hitler” and “Demon” and covered their faces with ski masks. The Americans in the Venezuelan prison were confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to what one prisoner called “psychological torture.”

Three months into their capture, the Americans were so filled with anger that they rebelled. They banged cell walls and kicked doors, they said, as other prisoners joined in, hundreds of them screaming for freedom until the concrete began to crack.

“Are you with me, my Venezuelans?” one of the prisoners, Gregory David Werber, yelled, a fellow inmate recalled.

“We are with you, gringo!” they yelled back.

Six American prisoners came home from Venezuela in late January, their freedom secured after an unusual and highly public visit by a Trump administration official to Caracas, the capital. Critics said the meeting between Richard Grenell, a special envoy, and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat, gave legitimacy to a leader accused of widespread human rights abuses and stealing a recent election.

Others pointed out that it got the Americans home.

Now free and adjusting to their new lives, three of the former prisoners spoke at length with The New York Times about their detention, providing the most detailed look yet at their experiences.

Some described being hooded, handcuffed and kidnapped at legal border crossings after trying to enter as tourists. All offered a rare inside view of Mr. Maduro’s expanding strategy to push global leaders to do what he wants: He has amassed dozens of prisoners from around the world to use as leverage in negotiations.

Nine other U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents remain in Venezuelan custody, according to the State Department. In total, there are at least 68 foreign passport holders wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela, according to a watchdog group, Foro Penal, more than Mr. Maduro has ever held.

They are detained alongside roughly 900 Venezuelan political prisoners.

The foreigners come from Spain, Germany, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and elsewhere. Almost all were captured in the last year.

The expansion of this strategy comes as Mr. Maduro loses support at home and abroad and seeks ways to exert influence. His goals include the lifting of U.S. sanctions and recognition from leaders like President Trump.

The arrests of foreigners also come amid a tug of war inside the Trump administration over how to deal with Mr. Maduro, according to analysts. Advisers like Mr. Grenell have shown a willingness to engage in quick-hit transactional deals — a public visit for the freedom of prisoners.

Others, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, push a more isolationist approach meant to squeeze Mr. Maduro from power, while supporting the release of detainees.

A spokesman for the State Department said the U.S. government was working to secure the release of all Americans unjustly detained in Venezuela.

Mr. Grenell did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Venezuela’s communications minister, Freddy Ñáñez.

The Venezuelan government has accused some of the detained Americans of terrorism and plotting to kill Mr. Maduro.

The Americans still in detention include Jonathan Pagan, who had been running a bakery in Venezuela with his Venezuelan wife, according to the returned men.

They also include Jorge Vargas, an older man with health problems who returnees said had declined so much he needed help getting out of bed.

A third American is Joseph St. Clair, an Air Force veteran who did four tours in Afghanistan and had traveled to the region to get treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, according to his father.

“He served his country,” said his father, Scott St. Clair. Mr. St. Clair was concerned about how his son’s PTSD would affect him in prison. He called on the Trump administration to do everything it could to get him out.

“I am in a very dark room,” the father said, “and I am looking for a sliver of light.”

The Capture

Venezuela — its mountains, its beaches, its people — called them.

It was last September. Mr. Werber, 62, a self-described software developer, was on a bucket-list trip through Latin America, he said.

David Guillaume, 30, was a traveling nurse from Florida with time on his hands. “I have three weeks,” he thought. “I just really want to do something different.”

David Estrella, 64, was a father of five from New Jersey living part-time in Ecuador. He just wanted to see friends, he said.

All were intrepid travelers, they explained, unaware that they were hurtling into a political booby trap.

Mr. Werber acquired a visa and traveled the country — driving along Venezuela’s coastline, trekking Mount Roraima — before officials at an airport pulled him aside on Sept. 19, he said, locked him at a military base, flew him to Caracas and left him in a high-security prison called Rodeo One.

Detained alongside him was his girlfriend, a Venezuelan citizen.

Mr. Guillaume, who was detained the same day, and Mr. Estrella, who was detained on Sept. 9, didn’t even make it into the country before their captures. Both arrived at Cúcuta, on the Colombia-Venezuela border, seeking permission to enter as tourists.

After presenting his passport to Venezuelan officials, Mr. Estrella was led to a vehicle, he said, handcuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Caracas.

Mr. Guillaume and his fiancée, Jaralmy Barradas, a Venezuelan citizen, were sent to the capital by car.

In Caracas, Mr. Estrella recalled spending five days in a chair at a facility run by the country’s military counterintelligence agency. Handcuffs with inner spikes tore at his wrists, he said.

Officials searched his phone and questioned him, always with cameras rolling.

“It was clear that they didn’t know who I was,” he said, “or have any idea why they had grabbed me, besides that I was an American.”

Both men said they were also taken to Rodeo One, stripped to their underwear, photographed, shaved and given cells on a floor filled with foreigners.

Dozens and dozens of foreigners.

The Rebellion

A man called Shark ran the prison. The guards gave only their aliases — Bronco, Lucifer — which they wore on their lapels.

The cells, two and a half steps by five and a half steps, according to Mr. Estrella, were concrete with metal doors. The Americans at Rodeo One were confined to these boxes all day, they said.

Venezuelan prisoners, including dissident members of the military, were held on an upper floor; some were kept for weeks in a small room called the “punishment zone,” where they were stripped naked and given little to eat. Mr. Guillaume discovered this after a brief visit.

Shark ignored the Americans’ pleas to see lawyers and U.S. officials, they said.

Of all the U.S. detainees, Mr. Werber was perhaps the most experienced in this situation. He’d gotten out of U.S. prison two years before, after he was convicted of laundering money for a drug cartel.

Federal authorities said he had past convictions for credit card fraud, smuggling, grand theft and fleeing the law — in the 1980s, he escaped from a California prison. In a separate incident in the 1990s, he was apprehended after a high-speed car chase, according to news reports at the time, accused of using fake checks to buy Jet Skis and a Porsche.

Mr. Werber said all this was a “past part” of his life, that he had gone to Venezuela as a tourist — and to check out the bitcoin industry — with no plans to commit crimes.

“I’ve done things that are inexcusable,” he said. “But that’s not who I am now.”

At Rodeo One, he became something of a leader, called “captain” and “Furious G” by the others. And one morning, he broke.

“We’re all innocent!” he shouted, banging his cell door, he recalled. “Let us go!”

Others joined in, the men said. The fury spread. Metal welds began to pop. Concrete blocks shook loose.

Two inmates used the loose blocks as battering rams, Mr. Werber said, and their cell doors broke open.

But the feeling of victory did not last long.

The guards grabbed riot gear, pepper-sprayed the prisoners, flung bags over their heads and began to beat them, Mr. Guillaume said.

“One of the regiment leaders, he came by, he put his foot on my head,” Mr. Guillaume continued. “He was like, ‘Welcome to Venezuela. Welcome to hell.’”

The Release

In Washington, Mr. Trump had just become president, and in Caracas, Mr. Maduro was calling for a new start to bilateral relations. By Jan. 31, Mr. Trump had dispatched Mr. Grenell to Venezuela.

The meeting was a major win for the Venezuelan leader, who hadn’t had a public visit from a U.S. official in years.

The autocrat, smiling for photographers, agreed not only to release U.S. prisoners, but also to accept Venezuelans deported from the United States. This was key to Mr. Trump’s ambitions to deport millions of migrants.

Guards led Mr. Werber, Mr. Guillaume, Mr. Estrella and three others to a car. Mr. Guillaume could see the Caribbean coastline as they descended to the airport.

But it wasn’t until he was on the plane that he believed he was going home, he said.

In the air the men got a call from Mr. Trump.

Afterward, Mr. Estrella called the president “awesome,” and said he was grateful the administration had made their release a priority. But he was perplexed by the limited assistance he got upon arrival — he lost 40 pounds during detention, he said, and came home with serious nerve and back problems.

The night of their release, the men were left at a hotel “and that’s it,” he said. No medical exam beyond a vitals check. No visit from a psychologist. No invitation to a government rehabilitation program — something typically offered to returning prisoners.

It wasn’t until March that the men began getting calls from the State Department, they said, telling them Mr. Rubio had declared them “wrongfully detained,” a label that triggers years of access to help.

The State Department spokesman said the government was in touch with the returnees and seeking to provide them with additional support.

Six weeks after his release, Mr. Guillaume is living in Colombia, staying with the family of his fiancée, Ms. Barradas, while she is locked up.

She is among at least a dozen Venezuelans arrested alongside the Americans — their girlfriends, wives and in-laws. The American returnees believe they are all still in prison.

Mr. Guillaume said the detention of his girlfriend haunts him, making him feel “dishonorable.”

He is free but she is not, he said, and so his heart and happiness are still trapped in Venezuela.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research, and Robert Jimison contributed reporting.

Help may at last be on the way for the Nepali Sherpas who carry heavy loads for foreign climbers through treacherous sections of the world’s tallest peak.

When the main climbing season begins next month on Mount Everest, expedition companies will test drones that can ferry loads as heavy as 35 pounds in the high altitudes, bring back ladders used to set the climbing routes, and remove waste that is typically left behind.

Goods that would normally take seven hours to be transported by foot from Everest’s base camp to Camp I can be airlifted within 15 minutes. By lightening the Sherpas’ burdens, drone operators hope that the chances of fatal accidents — which have risen as climate change has accelerated snowmelt — can now be reduced.

“Sherpas bear enormous risks. The drone makes their task safer, faster and more efficient,” said Tshering Sherpa, whose organization, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, is responsible for fixing the route through the deadly Khumbu Icefall, southwest of Everest’s summit.

For about a year, operators have been experimenting with two drones donated by their Chinese maker. The pilot test during this year’s Everest climbing season is seen as an important opportunity to persuade expedition agencies to invest in more of the devices, which could be used to carry climbing gear and essential items like oxygen cylinders.

While the upfront cost of the drones may be high, their proponents say they will eventually reduce agencies’ costs.

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The German Parliament is set to vote on Tuesday on a plan to loosen government borrowing limits in order to spend heavily on defense and infrastructure, in an effort to offset America’s pivot away from Europe and to lift the country out of years of economic stagnation.

If the measure eventually becomes law, it will radically reorient Germany’s relationship to government debt — and, its authors hope, allow Germany to shoulder a more powerful leadership role at a critical moment for Europe.

The center of the plan is a push led by Friedrich Merz, the likely next chancellor, to relax what is colloquially known as the “debt brake,” a limit on government borrowing that Germany enshrined in its Constitution.

That brake has reduced German debt, but it has also kept the government from investing in roads, software, bridges, tanks and other areas. Lawmakers say that spending is now urgently needed to address declining German competitiveness and shrinking American security guarantees.

Here is a quick guide to the debt brake, how Mr. Merz and his allies want to change it, and the challenges they will face.

What is the debt brake?

Like most wealthy nations, Germany borrows money to help balance its annual federal budget. But unlike some peers, most notably the United States, Germany has a Constitution that limits its yearly borrowing to just 0.35 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. There are exceptions for economic downturns and natural disasters.

German lawmakers have voted in recent years to circumvent the limits with some special pots of money, including emergency pandemic spending starting in 2020 and a recent bump in military spending. But by and large, the debt brake has constrained borrowing.

In 2009, when the debt brake was introduced, Germany, the United States and Britain had roughly similar levels of debt as a share of their economies. Since then, that share has soared in Britain and America, but fallen in Germany.

Why does Germany have it?

The debt brake was added to Germany’s Constitution after the country’s budget deficit grew during the 2008 financial crisis. It became a signature economic policy and a point of national pride.

But the country’s aversion to large deficits and debt predates the crisis. Its leaders borrowed heavily to help smooth reunification between West and East Germany in the early 1990s, with mixed economic effects. More notoriously, high government debt helped drive hyperinflation in the Weimar government of the 1920s, aiding the rise of Hitler.

That historical trauma has remained a neuralgic pain that has defined the public and political debate around government debt in Germany for generations.

Why change it now?

The debt brake didn’t just depress borrowing. Its critics say it also handcuffed German’s ability to spur its economy, invest in its future and lead in European security affairs.

German spending has lagged well behind its needs to upgrade its transportation networks, digitize its public services and make a host of other investments essential to its global competitiveness.

The country’s net public investment has been negative for the last 25 years, holding back economic growth, said Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.

The brake was also a major reason German lawmakers spent relatively little on their military for decades, under the belief that the United States would continue to protect their country as it has since the end of World War II.

Now, releasing the debt brake has become urgent as the German economy continues to shrink and President Trump threatens to scale back or remove America’s security role in Europe.

“It’s now or never for a big spending increase,” Mr. Fratzscher said.

Even officials at Germany’s staid central bank, the Bundesbank, have called for changes to the debt brake to free up money for government investment to drive growth.

“Rarely in Germany’s postwar history has government investment been as necessary as it is today — and rarely since reunification have the potential returns been so promising,” economists at the Deutsche Bank Research Institute wrote last week. “Germany has successfully used the good years of the past decade to create fiscal flexibility for more challenging times. And times will likely remain challenging for the rest of the decade.”

After resisting calls for debt-limit changes during the recent election campaign, Mr. Merz, of the center-right Christian Democrats, now says the brake must be changed. So do many center-left lawmakers.

“The reform of the debt brake is of central importance in view of the epochal change that the U.S.A. is no longer Germany’s reliable ally,” Anton Hofreiter, a member of Parliament for the Green Party, said in a text message this week.

With it, he said, “It is now possible to finance satellites, intelligence services, cyberdefense and support for Ukraine alongside the urgently needed upgrading of the Bundeswehr” — the German military.

What changes are lawmakers contemplating?

The agreement Mr. Merz struck with the Greens and the center-left Social Democrats would create an exemption from the debt brake for all spending on defense above 1 percent of gross domestic product. It would define “defense” broadly, to include domestic intelligence, aid to allies and other measures alongside weapons purchases. Effectively, Germany lawmakers could borrow whatever sums the government bond market would allow to fund those items.

Mr. Merz also agreed to create a new infrastructure fund of 500 billion euros — almost $550 billion — spread over 12 years, outside of the debt brake’s limits. Of that, €100 billion would be earmarked for projects to fight climate change.

What are the chances they succeed?

Good, but hurdles remain.

Having decided to change the Constitution to allow extra borrowing, Mr. Merz has taken the unusual step of passing the measure in the final days of a lame-duck Parliament, before he can even become chancellor.

On Tuesday, with the help of the Greens and Social Democrats, Mr. Merz hopes to get two-thirds of the Parliament’s vote needed to change the Constitution. The margins are slim, and they will depend on some lawmakers who will leave office after this week.

If the vote passes, the change will still need to be approved by the Federal Council of the States on Friday before it can go into effect. That, too, could turn out to be very close.

Even then, the plan faces legal challenges, including from the far-right party Alternative for Germany. Courts have refused to stop the vote thus far.

Lawmakers from the three big centrist parties supporting the package say they are confident they will prevail.

“We should not let this opportunity pass us by — it’s a big opportunity for our country and also a real change in politics,” Mr. Merz said on Sunday.

Chinese state media is gloating about drastic budget cuts to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, U.S. government-funded media outlets that have for decades drawn protests from Beijing over their coverage of human rights abuses in China.

Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had long transmitted news into countries where access to accurate information from the outside world was severely limited. Radio Free Asia, for instance, broadcasts in Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur, Tibetan and other languages.

In China, where the ruling Communist Party has railed against the influence of America and its Western allies on global opinion, state media outlets and nationalists hailed the troubles faced by the U.S.-funded outlets as vindication of their complaints. The authorities have for years jammed Voice of America and Radio Free Asia radio transmissions.

The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, denounced Voice of America as a “frontline propaganda tool” and a “lie factory.”

“Almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial on Monday, citing what it described as biased reports about Taiwan, unrest in Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.

The news outlets and their ability to operate is in question after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday calling for the dismantling of the Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that oversees them. At Voice of America, hundreds of employees in Washington were informed that they were being put on paid leave. Radio Free Asia said the federal grants that funded it were terminated on Saturday morning.

The Chinese government has argued that the dominance of American soft power, in the form of these news sources, has undermined China’s security at home and its economic and geopolitical interests abroad. This insecurity has only sharpened under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has pushed for China’s voice, more specifically that of the party’s, to be heard more loudly.

“Against this backdrop, the actions of the Trump administration are cause for enthusiastic celebration,” said David Bandurski, the director of the China Media Project, a research organization. “In a matter of weeks, Trump seems to have slit the throat of American influence.”

For decades, Chinese listeners tuned in to Voice of America for news that was censored at home — coverage that included the toll of natural disasters and crackdowns on pro-democracy protesters. Its programs on politics and culture also shaped the thinking of a generation of intellectuals and liberal thinkers in the 1970s and ’80s, when the country gradually reopened after years of isolation.

In 1989, Voice of America expanded its Mandarin service to cover the pro-democracy movement that swept across the country and the government’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square. The network’s correspondents were among the foreign journalists expelled from China that year.

Radio Free Asia stood out as a crucial news source about Xinjiang and Tibet, where foreign journalists have limited access, and about dissidents elsewhere in the country. Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur service’s reporting in recent years was noted for exposing the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang and publishing the first accounts of deaths in the camps.

In the past decade, the Chinese authorities have repeatedly sought to retaliate against Uyghur journalists working with the broadcaster. It detained more than 50 relatives of journalists on staff in Xinjiang in 2021. One journalist, Gulchehra Hoja, a Uyghur American working for Radio Free Asia, said in 2018 that two dozen of her family members had been detained in Xinjiang.

James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University and an expert on Uyghur issues, said that he has served as an external reviewer for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur service and was familiar with the broadcaster’s work. “I know the pains they take to make their stories accurate and appealing to the global community they serve,” he said. “All of this has been accomplished by a small staff at a tiny cost.”

“To cancel it willy-nilly as Trump has done, possibly without even knowing he was doing so, is foolhardy and needlessly cruel to people who the U.S. is supposed to be supporting,” he added.

Bay Fang, the president and chief executive of Radio Free Asia, said in a statement that the termination of the federal grant that funds the outlet was a “reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space.” Ms. Fang said the organization planned to challenge the order.

In a social media post on Sunday, Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of Global Times, celebrated the “paralysis” of the news outlets, calling it “very gratifying.”

While noting that political tensions within the Trump administration had ultimately led to its problems, he said he believed all Chinese people would be pleased to see “the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within and scattered like birds and beasts.”

Britain’s center-left government outlined plans on Tuesday to curb spiraling welfare costs as it attempts to juggle a difficult set of competing objectives: saving public money, incentivizing work and protecting the most vulnerable.

The announcement follows weeks of tense internal debate within the governing Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, about how to cut Britain’s spending on welfare, which has risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The status quo is unacceptable but it is not inevitable,” Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, said in Parliament, promising “decisive action” to get those who can work into employment, protect those who cannot, and save five billion pounds (about $6.5 billion) by 2030.

For Labour, a party that sees itself as the creator and guardian of Britain’s post-World War II welfare state, cutting support for some of the most vulnerable in society is especially contentious.

But Britain, with a total population of about 68 million, now has more than 9.3 million people of working age across England, Scotland and Wales who are not employed, a rise of 713,000 since 2020. Of those, 2.8 million receive long-term sickness payments or related welfare, according to the government, which expects the number to grow to more than four million if nothing is done. The government spent £65 billion on sickness payments last year.

Facing mounting pressure to increase military spending, at a time when public services including the health system are badly underfunded, and economic growth is sluggish, Britain’s Treasury is searching for cuts to public programs.

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