President Biden on Friday praised Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech in which he took a swipe at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, calling it “a good speech” that raised concerns “shared not only by him but by many Americans.”

While Mr. Biden did not explicitly endorse the specific criticisms in the speech, or Mr. Schumer’s call for elections to replace Mr. Netanyahu, the president’s comments were the latest step in his escalating public criticism of the Israeli prime minister.

Privately, the two have clashed in a series of phone calls — the last of which was a month ago — but Mr. Biden has been reluctant to publicly part ways with Mr. Netanyahu.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Schumer said he gave the speech because “I thought it was important to show that even if you strongly disagree with Netanyahu, you can still be a strong ally of Israel.”

There is no indication that the White House was in any way involved in the planning of the speech.

But sometimes in Washington, the most telling indicator is not a public statement, but its absence. Mr. Biden could have asked Mr. Schumer to restrain himself so as not to jeopardize the president’s future ability to deal with Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he now barely speaks. He could have said that the United States should not express an opinion about the inner workings of Israel’s democratic processes. He didn’t.

Lawmakers and aides who have spoken with Mr. Biden in recent weeks say his anger at Mr. Netanyahu is now eating away at his reluctance to make his criticisms public. He is angry that Mr Netanyahu has publicly rejected the government’s push to limit the bombing campaigns that have killed some 30,000 people in Gaza, allow much more aid and plan for a post-war future that does not involve Israel running the territory .

Last week, Mr. Biden was heard telling a congressman that he and Mr. Netanyahu should have a “come to Jesus” meeting.

Mr. Biden said that Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York and Senate Majority Leader, had briefed his White House staff before the speech in which the senator denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership in the war against Hamas and concluded that the prime minister risked causing trouble for Israel. a global pariah.

“I’m not going to comment on the speech,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question as he received the Irish prime minister at the White House. “He gave a good speech and I think he expressed a serious concern that was shared not only by him but by many Americans.”

The day before Mr. Schumer stood in the Senate pit and delivered his remarks, he called Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, and Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff, according to people familiar with the conversation. . He asked Mr. Sullivan whether giving the speech could jeopardize hostage release negotiations and was told there was no problem. Mr Zients made no political objections.

Mr. Biden has staunchly supported Israel’s right to defend itself and respond to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack that killed 1,200 people. The president has also rejected calls from within his own party to cut off the flow of weapons or impose conditions on their use.

But Mr. Biden has become increasingly critical of Mr. Netanyahu’s government for its war-making. In his State of the Union address last week, Mr. Biden said that “Israel must allow more aid into Gaza and ensure that humanitarian workers are not caught in the crossfire” and that “protecting and saving innocent lives is a priority must be. ”

Over the weekend, Mr. Biden hinted — but stopped short of saying — that he might impose some restrictions on weapons supplied to Israel if his warnings are ignored. “It’s a red line, but I will never leave Israel,” he said, saying defensive weapons like the Iron Dome, which intercepts incoming missiles, would never be compromised.

But that left open whether he would set limits on how Israel would use 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs against targets in Gaza, where massive explosions in an urban environment cause widespread casualties. Mr. Sullivan sidestepped questions about the president’s thinking this week, saying that “we are not going to engage in hypotheticals about what will ultimately happen, and that reports purporting to describe the president’s thinking are uninformed speculation .”

Mr. Schumer also stopped short of advocating limits on weapons sent to Israel. But some of his Democratic colleagues, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, are openly calling for it. A dozen senators have said they are working on an amendment that would require weapons received by any country to be used “in accordance with United States law,” which includes provisions limiting attacks that could cause collateral damage to civilians .

Yet Schumer’s speech on Thursday went further than any senior US official has gone in castigating Netanyahu.

The Prime Minister has “lost his way in allowing his political survival to take precedence over Israel’s interests” and “has been too willing to tolerate the toll on civilians in Gaza, which has driven global support for Israel to an all-time low.” pushes’. Schumer said.

He went on to say that he believed that “new elections are the only way to enable a healthy and open decision-making process about Israel’s future.” Those elections, he added, should take place “as soon as the war begins to wind down” and “give Israelis the opportunity to express their vision of the post-war future.”

“Of course, the United States cannot dictate the outcome of an election,” Mr. Schumer continued, “nor should we try to do so. That is for the Israeli public to decide – a public that I believe understands better than anyone that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah against which the rest of the world opposes.”

The speech caused a furor in Israel, especially on the part of Mr. Schumer, a longtime Jewish supporter of the Jewish state and a close ally of Mr. Biden.

After Mr. Biden spoke on Friday, a White House spokesman emphasized that the president was not specifically calling for a new election. “That is for the Israeli people to decide,” said the spokesman, John F. Kirby.

Critics in the United States and Israel have complained that Mr. Schumer’s comments amounted to an inappropriate foreign intervention in the internal democratic politics of an ally, an intervention that was particularly egregious at a time of war when Israel was fighting an enemy his destruction was over. In the past, however, Mr. Biden’s aides have noted Mr. Netanyahu’s willingness to insert himself into the American political process, particularly when he appeared before Congress to oppose passage of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal .

Mr. Biden offered his thoughts on Mr. Schumer’s speech during a meeting in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, himself an outspoken critic of Israel’s handling of the war. Mr Varadkar made good on his promise to raise the issue with Mr Biden at the annual meeting at the White House to mark St Patrick’s Day.

“I also want to continue talking about the situation in Gaza,” Mr Varadkar told Mr Biden. “You know my opinion that we need a ceasefire as soon as possible to get food and medicine in and to get hostages out. And we need to talk about how we can make that happen and move toward a two-state solution, which I believe is the only way we can achieve lasting peace and security.”

Biden nodded. “I agree,” he said softly.

Still, Mr. Varadkar left the meeting realizing that whatever his own concerns about Mr. Netanyahu’s military operations, Mr. Biden had no intention of cutting off the flow of American munitions and air defenses to Israel.

“The president has been very clear that the US will continue to support Israel and help Israel defend itself, so I don’t think that will change,” Mr Varadkar told reporters outside the White House after the meeting. “But I don’t think any of us like to see American weapons being used the way they are being used. The way they are currently used is not self-defense.

The White House is so concerned about TikTok’s security risks that federal employees are not allowed to use the app on their government phones. Top Biden administration officials have even helped draft legislation that could ban TikTok in the United States.

But those concerns were put aside Thursday, on the evening of President Biden’s State of the Union address, when dozens of social media influencers — including many TikTok stars — were invited to the White House for a watch party.

The crowd took selfies in the State Dining Room, drank bubbly with the first lady and waved to Mr. Biden from the White House balcony as he left to deliver his speech to Congress.

“Don’t jump, I need you!” Mr Biden shouted at the young influencers filming from above, in a scene that was – of course – captured in a TikTok video, which was broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people.

Thursday’s party at the White House was an example of Mr. Biden’s political concerns colliding head-on with his national security concerns. Despite growing fears that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, could breach Americans’ personal data or manipulate what they see, the president’s campaign is banking on the app to energize a frustrated bloc of young voters. in the run-up to the 2024 elections.

“From a national security perspective, the campaign joining TikTok definitely didn’t look good — it condoned the use of a platform that the administration and everyone in DC recognizes is a national problem,” said Lindsay Gorman, chief technology and geopolitics officer at the German Marshall Fund and a former technical advisor to the Biden administration.

TikTok is the most popular platform among American teenagers after YouTube, making it an attractive political tool. But concerns about the app’s structure have grown, and a House committee this week introduced a bill that would keep TikTok out of U.S. app stores unless the platform broke away from ByteDance.

When members of Congress talk about TikTok, they tend to focus on its privacy issues, and whether data about users is stored in China or accessible to Chinese officials who can demand the company turn over the information.

But national security officials have a deeper concern: The algorithms that determine what users see are now designed almost entirely in China. The key is to prevent Chinese engineers, perhaps under state influence, from using the code in ways that could censor or manipulate what American users see. TikTok has pushed back on such concerns, saying its opponents have not provided evidence to support these fears.

That’s especially important, officials say, as election season approaches. If Chinese officials wanted to influence the election, the app could provide a subtle way to do so. But even the legislation now being passed by Congress may not have an impact on that: it would not come into effect until five months after a law is signed. At most, that would be a month or so before Election Day.

The White House has supported the restrictions.

Mr. Biden’s National Security Council called the bill in the House of Representatives “an important and welcome step” and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said it should be quickly sent to the president’s desk for his signature. While the legislation’s path in the Senate is unclear, Mr. Biden claimed on Friday that he had approved the package.

“If they approve it, I will sign it,” Mr. Biden said.

ByteDance has spent Mr. Biden’s term promoting a plan to address security concerns surrounding TikTok by storing its U.S. user data on Oracle servers in the United States. That plan formed the core of a 2022 draft agreement between ByteDance and government negotiators. But senior government officials at the time were concerned that the proposed deal did not go far enough to address their concerns.

Despite all those concerns, TikTok’s political benefits were clear this week.

Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old political commentator on TikTok, reached more than 800,000 followers from his perch in the White House as he and others watched Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday.

“He called the Supreme Court directly to their faces for overturning Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Sisson said in a message during the speech. “You have to see this, watch the clip.”

Later, in his fourth video during the speech, Mr. Sisson said of the president, “He came to talk to us about how content creation is super important in 2024 because, you know, the media landscape is changing.”

He added: “No one really watches cable news anymore.”

The Biden campaign declined to answer questions about the specific security protocols for posting TikToks or why the campaign embraced the platform before spinning it out of ByteDance. The White House has denied that Mr. Biden’s national security team wants to ban the app.

“We don’t see this as a ban on these apps – that’s not what this is – but by ensuring that their property does not end up in the hands of those who could harm us,” Ms Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday. “This is obviously about our national security, and this is what we are focused on here.”

The Biden campaign joined TikTok on the night of the Super Bowl.

Previously, the government had avoided opening its own TikTok accounts while tapping into the app’s audience by inviting social media stars to briefings on the Covid-19 vaccines and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But after rejecting the traditional presidential halftime interview on Super Bowl Sunday, the campaign arrived on TikTok with an inaugural post mocking a right-wing conspiracy theory claiming Biden rigged the game.

Democrats say the embrace of social media platforms like TikTok is an effort to meet voters where they are.

“We have to deal with the cards we’ve been dealt,” said Quentin James, co-founder of Collective PAC, an organization that aims to elect Black officials. “If the tools are available, we should use them, even if there are international security problems. If the Biden campaign were to lose access to this and leave it to the Trump campaign and others to use it, that would be an extreme disadvantage.”

Former President Donald J. Trump attacked the administration for the possible ban on TikTok, saying it would only give Meta, Facebook’s parent company, more power.

Mr. Trump’s criticism of this effort was notable because he had worked to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to Oracle during his time in office. Its CEO, Safra Catz, was a member of Trump’s 2016 transition team and a major supporter of the campaign.

As the campaign tries to use the platform to connect with younger voters, efforts by the White House and Congress to reform the company have enraged TikTok users. After the bill was introduced this week, TikTok took the unusually aggressive step of sending a pop-up message to US users on Thursday asking them to call their representatives and protest the bill. Some Capitol Hill offices said they were inundated with calls, including from teenagers. Lawmakers complained that TikTok misrepresented the bill by claiming it required an immediate ban on the platform.

Meanwhile, a video the Biden campaign posted about the North Carolina governor’s race quickly gathered responses asking Mr. Biden to halt a TikTok ban.

One user expressed his confusion in a comment that drew likes from others on the app: “Aren’t you about to ban TikTok? Why did your team make you an account in the first place?

David McCabe And David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

After President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “crazy SOB” this week, the Kremlin quickly issued a stern condemnation.

But the image of an unpredictable strongman ready to escalate his conflict with the West is one that Putin has fully embraced after two years of all-out war.

At home, the Kremlin is maintaining a mystery over the circumstances of Aleksei A. Navalny’s death last week, preventing the opposition leader’s family from reclaiming his body.

In Ukraine, Putin is pressuring his military to continue the brutal offensive, bragging on television that he stayed up all night as the city of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces.

And in space, U.S. officials warn, Russia may be planning to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit aboard a satellite, which would violate one of the last arms control treaties.

Putin, 71, who has been in power since 1999, will extend his rule until 2030 in next month’s Russian elections. As the vote approaches, he is fueling his increasingly public image of himself as a leader who is making history and carrying on the legacy of past rulers who were willing to sacrifice untold numbers of lives to build a stronger Russian state.

But Putin also faces headwinds: a still determined Ukrainian resistance, a Western alliance that remains largely united and murmurs of discontent among the Russian public. The question is whether Putin, while he exults in leading a “millennial, eternal Russia,” can avoid the domestic unrest that has also repeatedly been a feature of the country’s history.

“Putin lives in eternity,” said Boris B. Nadezhdin, an anti-war politician who tried to launch a presidential bid to challenge Putin but was excluded from the March vote. He mentioned rulers from the ninth century and added of Mr Putin: “It is clear that he thinks of himself alongside Oleg the Wise, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and perhaps Stalin.”

Mr. Nadezhdin, who has worked for the Russian government and served in parliament, emphasized in a video call this week that Mr. Putin’s grip on power is weaker than it appears at first glance. The security, stability and increased prosperity that were long Putin’s selling points after the chaos of the 1990s are all in decline, Nadezhdin said; “This regime,” he continued, “is historically doomed.”

Even though Putin has worked hard to paint a picture of Russia as an invincible state, he has been repeatedly caught off guard. There was the stunning failure of the Kremlin’s intelligence services two years ago, when Putin expected that Russian troops would be welcomed as liberators and that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government would quickly collapse.

There was the 24-hour uprising that took place last summer, when Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, long seen as a close ally of Putin, brought Russia to the brink of civil war.

And despite a crackdown on dissent, which some analysts say is fiercer than the Soviet Union is at an advanced stage, Russians are still braving arrests to demonstrate their differences.

A group of women have continued to organize small protests, demanding that their mobilized sons and husbands be brought home; in dozens of Russian cities, people laid flowers in memory of Mr. Navalny; and Mr. Nadezhdin was able to submit more than 100,000 signatures last month in his bid to bring an anti-war message to the presidential election.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the Federal Election Commission’s ruling to keep Mr. Nadezhdin off the ballot. It was a sign that, although Putin has allowed liberal candidates to run against him in previous elections as an expression of pluralism, this time he is not taking any chances.

Instead, the Kremlin appears focused on using the presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17, as a spectacle of public approval of Putin’s rule – and his invasion.

This Thursday, Putin will take the stage with his annual State of the Nation address, a televised event in which the president presides over hundreds of top officials and pledges their loyalty to their leader.

Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor close to the Kremlin, said being able to present a landslide election victory as evidence of public support for the war appeared to be Putin’s main goal for the March election.

“The elections – and Vladimir Putin’s high showing in these elections – are intended to electorally legitimize Putin’s policies, including the SVO,” Remchukov said in a telephone interview, using the Russian initials for “special military operation ”, the Kremlin’s term for the war. “For example, if he gets 75 to 80 percent of the votes, it means that people are giving him their approval for this policy.”

By portraying the invasion as having broad public support, the Kremlin can also justify its crackdown on dissent.

Images of masked security officers detaining critics of the war have become commonplace on Russian television. On Tuesday, Russia’s domestic security service, known as the FSB, announced it had arrested a visiting 33-year-old Russian-American woman on suspicion of treason.

Her alleged crime: donating about $50 to a Ukrainian charity. She faces twenty years in prison.

News of that arrest came just four days after the death of Mr. Navalny, who spent more than three years in prison, including about 300 days in solitary “punishment cells.” How Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic prison known as Polar Wolf remains unknown; his spokeswoman said Thursday that authorities said he died of natural causes.

On Thursday, Mr.’s mother said. Navalny said authorities “blackmailed” her into agreeing to a “secret funeral” for her son.

“With Navalny’s death, the Russian regime has surpassed the regime of the late Soviet Union in its brutality and cynicism,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote. He argued that Putin’s rule has changed from “a dictatorship of deceit into a dictatorship of fear, and after the outbreak of war into an outright dictatorship of terror.”

But Putin publicly keeps his distance from the repressive machinery he oversees. Although a spokesman said the president had been informed of Mr Navalny’s death, Mr Putin himself has not commented on it.

Instead, Mr. Putin revealed this week that he was up late the night after Mr. Navalny died, consumed by something else: the war in Ukraine.

During a televised meeting with his Defense Minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, Putin described being informed in real time about the Russian advance in Avdiivka until 4 a.m. last Saturday morning. At 11 a.m., Mr. Shoigu and Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s General Staff, returned to again brief the Russian leader on Ukraine’s hasty withdrawal from the strategically important city, Mr. Putin said.

Mr Shoigu said the military had carried out the president’s order to set up loudspeakers on the southern Ukrainian front to persuade soldiers to surrender. The message was aimed at showing Mr Putin as a tireless leader, in tune with all the details of the war.

At the meeting, Mr. Putin dismissed White House concerns about possible Russian plans to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit this year. Instead, he said, it was Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons, intended for Earth-bound targets, that “they should really be afraid of.”

On Thursday, Putin took a further step to remind the world of Russia’s arsenal by making a 30-minute flight in a nuclear-capable bomber. But when asked hours later about Mr. Biden’s “crazy SOB” comments that the Kremlin spokesman had previously condemned, Mr. Putin turned playful. – a reminder of the former KGB agent’s fixation on sowing confusion.

Using a nickname for Vladimir, Mr. Putin said of Mr. Biden: “He cannot say, ‘Volodya, good boy.’”

Jefa Greenaway will never forget the first time he heard his father's voice. It was in 2017, when he watched a documentary about the struggle of indigenous Australians to be recognized in the country's constitution.

“It was harrowing, surreal,” Mr. Greenaway recalled. “In a word: emotional.”

In the film, his father, Bert Groves, an Indigenous man and civil rights activist born in 1907, tells how he was prevented from getting an education because of the size of his skull, a victim of phrenology, the pseudoscience that stuck in Australia. until the 20th century.

Now 53, Mr Greenaway was just a baby when his father died, leaving him to be raised in Australia by his German mother. Yet his father's values ​​– such as standing up for indigenous rights and valuing education – were instilled in the young boy.

Mr Greenaway is one of what he estimates are fewer than 20 registered Indigenous architects in Australia today. He is also a leading proponent of what is known as 'Country-centered design', which brings an Aboriginal worldview to construction projects.

“People like Jefa are rare,” says Peter Salhani, an Australian architectural journalist who has admired Mr Greenways' work in Melbourne for several years. His projects, Mr. Salhani said, “are without a doubt the voice of indigenous people – we need them now more than ever.”

For many Indigenous Australians, the country where they were born or to which they belong is of spiritual importance. When people speak of 'Land' they mean not just physical land and waterways, but a belief system in which everything is animate and there is no separation between people, animals, buildings, plants, rocks, water and air.

One goal of the design approach that embraces this worldview is to reveal what was found in a place before European settlement and to do so in a way that puts the environment first.

One of the best examples of a Greenaway project that reflects these values ​​is an amphitheater and plaza that connects the University of Melbourne, where the architect studied, with Swanston Street, considered the civic backbone of the city. Sitting under a baby gum tree, Mr Greenaway pointed to mudbrick tracery on the amphitheater ground that wound around clumps of native plants and invaded the interiors of buildings.

“This represents a creek that was once here,” Mr. Greenaway said. For thousands of years it was an aquatic highway for migrating eels before being channeled into a stormwater drain. Today, occasionally an eel is found disoriented in university pondslost as they try to continue their migration route.

Land-oriented design is less aesthetic and more of a different approach to the construction process. It starts with an indigenous architect leading the project and working with the local indigenous community. Mr Greenaway described it as 'co-design'.

Land-centered design also puts sustainability at the forefront, seeking to give back to the land, not take from it. “That's how we've always done it,” Mr. Greenaway said, referring to indigenous cultures.

Indigenous Australians are better represented in much of the creative sector, from music to visual arts to theater and literature, than in architecture, which Mr Greenaway says remains “a kind of last bastion”.

“There is still a feeling that architecture is not for us because it has been complicit in colonization,” he continued. “Now that we have more voices contributing to this space, we are going to really change the idea of ​​what design and architecture can do for the community in the coming years.”

A short tram ride away from the amphitheater is the first project Mr. Greenaway tested his design ideas: Ngarara placeat the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

The first thing you notice is the small scale. Ngarara Place consists of a segmented garden bed of native plants, with each section representing one of the six or seven seasons observed by the Kulin Nations, the Aboriginal people who inhabited the area. It also has a fire pit for smoking ceremonies, a wooden amphitheater and an installation of contemporary indigenous art.

Ngarara means “gathering” in the language of this country's traditional custodians, and the site is “activated,” Mr. Greenaway said, when it is used in ceremonies or even when students are just hanging out.

“It still amazes me that this little place has increased interest in these concepts,” Mr. Greenaway said as he surveyed the site. “It kind of changed the conversation and had a ripple effect.”

Before Ngarara Place, his company, Greenaway Architects, which he founded with his wife Catherine Drosinos, worked almost exclusively on residential projects. Today he is involved in larger public projects, reflecting the growing interest in this design in mainstream Australia.

In the state of New South Wales, major infrastructure projects must now take Indigenous design into account, and there are mandatory credits in Indigenous design to earn an architecture degree in Australia.

“We have reached a level of cultural maturity where we can now have these conversations,” Mr. Greenaway said.

Asked about last year's referendum that failed In his bid to give Indigenous Australians a voice in parliament in the form of an advisory body, Mr Greenaway said there were still reasons for optimism.

“I am encouraged because there is a very strong appetite to engage with Indigenous culture and find pathways to reconciliation,” he said.

At Melbourne's central meeting point, Federation Square, stands the Koorie Heritage Trust, a cultural center celebrating South East Australia's First Nations heritage. Mr Greenaway has recently completed the fit-out of the building, which is spread over three levels. The overhead lighting layout speaks to native astronomy and is reminiscent of nearby concrete columns scar treesand images on walls symbolize a smoking ceremony.

Many objects from the cultural collection were housed in drawers that invited people to open them, but information panels were missing. When this apparent omission was pointed out, Mr. Greenaway smiled.

“You look at it from this Western way of thinking about what a cultural collection should be,” he said. “What this is is an invitation to be active, not passive, to go up and start a conversation” with museum staff.

When Mr Greenaway was a student, he was the only Indigenous person in his class studying architecture at the University of Melbourne. Today, he estimates that there are between 70 and 80 Indigenous students enrolled in design and architecture programs across the country.

Many of these students know Mr. Greenaway as an accessible mentor.

He co-founded a non-profit organization – Indigenous Architecture and Design Australia – to support Aboriginal people pursuing design careers, and help them navigate an industry that is still adapting to Indigenous design thinking. He also recently co-authored the International Indigenous Design Charter, a global blueprint for working with indigenous knowledge in commercial design practice.

His focus on the ecological and ancestral stories of Aboriginal people makes him a pioneer whose projects are “inherently political,” says Alison Page, a Dharawal and Yuin woman and co-author of “Initial knowledge design”, a book that discusses indigenous architecture in contemporary Australia.

His approach, Ms. Page said, has helped pave the way for other projects to grapple with the legacy of injustices that arise from the history of Indigenous and colonial encounters.

“When you design this way, you start to reveal stories and narratives,” she said. “Some of these can be hard to face, but they are part of the truth of a place. That kind of truth telling is not so far away now.”

Next up for Greenaway Architects will be a national first: a college at the University of Technology Sydney, designed specifically for First Nations students.

From the steps of Melbourne's war memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance, the views of the city are breathtaking. While the cityscape from this perspective is dominated by skyscrapers rising above Victorian-era boulevards, Mr. Greenaway's projects are subtle and intimate at ground level.

Mr Greenaway said his aim was to create places “coded with meaning, but never ostentatious” and to “embed a layer in Melbourne's urban fabric that gave First Nations Peoples agency”.

Asked about his future ambitions, he said: “My hope really is that through our practice we have charted a new direction around design equity, to ensure that the voice of the voiceless is normalized within design practice in Australia. but also beyond. It starts now, but we have to keep the momentum going.”

Since Ecuador's president declared war on gangs last month, soldiers with assault rifles have flooded the streets of Guayaquil, a sprawling city on the Pacific coast that has been an epicenter of the country's years-long descent into violence.

They pull men from buses and cars looking for drugs, weapons and gang tattoos, and patrol roads to enforce curfews. The city is on edge, its men and teenage boys potential targets for troops and police officers tasked with taking down powerful gangs that have joined forces with international cartels to make Ecuador a center of the global drug trade.

But when people see soldiers passing by, many clap or give a thumbs up. “We applaud the iron fist, we celebrate it,” said Guayaquil Mayor Aquiles Álvarez. “It helped bring peace.”

In early January, Guayaquil was hit by a wave of violence that could prove to be a turning point in the country's long-running security crisis: Gangs attacked the city after authorities took control of Ecuador's prisons, which were largely controlled by gangs.

Police officers were kidnapped, explosives detonated and invaded an episode Broadcast live, a dozen armed men briefly seized a major television station.

The president, Daniel Noboa, has declared an internal conflict, an extraordinary step taken when the state is attacked by an armed group. He has deployed troops against the gangs, who have taken over much of Ecuador. He battles for control of the cocaine smuggling routes, transforming the country from one of South America's most peaceful to one of its deadliest.

Ecuador's top military commander warned that every gang member now was “a military objective.”

Mr. Noboa's aggressive response has reduced violence and brought a precarious sense of security to places like Guayaquil, a city of 2.7 million and a major drug trafficking port, boosting government approval. 76 percent from a recent national survey.

It has also raised alarm among human rights activists.

“We don't see anything new or innovative,” said Fernando Bastias of Guayaquil's Standing Committee for the Defense of Human Rights. “What we are seeing is an increase in the number of cases of serious human rights violations.”

Ecuador's approach has drawn comparisons to El Salvador, where its young leader, Nayib Bukele, has largely dismantled his brutal gangs, earning him a landslide re-election victory and admiration across Latin America. But critics say he has also flouted human rights and the rule of law and ordered mass arrests that have ensnared innocent people.

“Ecuador is an important case because it is almost a second laboratory for Bukele's policies,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America. “People are so desperate that they are buying into the need for these iron-fist policies to reduce crime.”

The policies can be effective, but, he added, “the costs to civil liberties are high.”

Just like Mr. Bukele, Mr. Noboa (36). to build mega prisons and his social media posts include pumping music and images of prisoners handcuffed and stripped to the waist. He proclaims it “The Noboa Road.”

Yet there are important differences, says Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a research group in London. While Mr. Bukele disdains democracy, Mr. Noboa has “portrayed his government as a democracy under siege,” Mr. Sabatini said.

Mr. Noboa also faces another opponent, said Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“El Salvador has never been important for the drug trade,” he said. “It's just too small.” Ecuador, by contrast, now plays a central role in the global cocaine trade, he said, and has ties to cartels from Mexico to Europe. As a result, the gangs have millions to arm themselves to fight the authorities.

But, he added, “we see Noboa moving toward a strategy of mass arrests.”

Since the president declared war on the gangs, authorities in Ecuador have made arrests more than 6,000 people.

In Guayaquil, soldiers and police are destroying camera systems installed by gangs to monitor entire neighborhoods, storming areas previously largely off-limits to police and knocking down doors Unpleasant discover caches of weapons and explosives.

The crackdown has had some effect.

From December to January, the number of murders in Guayaquil fell 33 percent, from 187 to 125. Outside the city's morgue, Cheyla Jurado, a street vendor who sells juice and pastries to families waiting to collect the bodies, said the crowds had visibly thinned out. .

“Now it's car accidents, drownings,” she said.

At the city's largest hospital, the number of patients arriving with gunshot wounds and other violence-related injuries has dropped from five a day to just one every three days, said Dr. Rodolfo Zevallos, an emergency physician.

The postponement of the bloodshed – even though it is still in its early stages – has a lot of support for the young president.

“We can sit outside at night,” said Janet Cisneros, who sells home-cooked meals in Guayaquil's Suburbio neighborhood. “We couldn't do that before; we were just completely stuck inside.”

Mr Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, was elected in November to complete his predecessor's term, which was cut short when he dissolved parliament, triggering early elections.

In January, when violence broke out, he traded his business suit and shy smile for a grimace, buzz cut and black leather jacketannouncing that Ecuador would no longer take orders from “narco-terrorist groups.”

The tough message is aimed at Ecuadorians, who will vote for president again next year, said Mr. Flores-Macías, the political scientist, but is also intended to gain support from international leaders — especially President Biden. Mr. Noboa, he said, “sees clearly that he needs the support — the guidance, financing and assistance — from the United States.”

So far, the Biden administration has provided Ecuador with equipment and training, along with approximately $93 million in military and humanitarian assistance.

Ecuadorian officials have said the military is crucial to reclaiming the country neighborhoods of gangs that have become de facto authorities, recruiting boys as young as twelve to transport drugs, kidnap and kill.

Mr. Noboa's office did not respond to requests for comment.

In Guayaquil, police paint murals of gang leaders. Soldiers conducting street raids tell young men found with small bags of marijuana about the dangers of drugs or a life of crime.

But videos are circulating showing authorities also using harsher tactics, with men and boys being rounded up on the streets hitting on the head or forced to do so kiss each other. In a widely shared video, a teenager is encouraged to do so exfoliating a tattoo until his chest bleeds.

Similar abuses are taking place in prisons where the military was sent to take control from gangs, lawyers and families of prisoners said.

“They let the prisoners get beaten worse than Jesus Christ,” said Fernanda Lindao, whose son is serving a prison sentence for theft in Guayaquil's Litoral Penitentiary. “There are no human rights for prisoners.”

Still, arrest videos are extremely popular, with many Ecuadorians praising the soldiers and the president.

“The public is cheering what is happening,” said Mr. Álvarez, the mayor of Guayaquil, “and they are applauding not because they are bad people, but because they are tired of all the violence they have had to endure.”

To explain their support for Mr. Noboa's tactics, many described how bad things had become.

“They killed and dumped bodies here,” said Rosa Elena Guachicho, who lives in Durán, a Guayaquil suburb with unpaved roads and no drinking water. “A month ago they found one in a pillowcase, chopped up.”

Dolores Garacoia said gangs had taken over Durán. Taxi drivers refused to enter for fear they would be robbed or kidnapped, she said. Even the police did not feel safe.

Gangs threatened small business owners like Ms. Garacoia, who said she closed the store she had run for years after receiving a phone call demanding payment of thousands of dollars. vacuumor vaccine.

“I had to take the sign down and close it immediately,” she said.

Just as the residents of Guayaquil have changed to adapt to the violence (staying indoors and getting pit bulls), so has the physical appearance of the city. Houses have become cages, entangled in two- or three-story bars.

Ángel Chávez, 14, sat behind wrought iron bars at a community center in Monte Sinai, part of Guayaquil's most dangerous neighborhood where more than 500 people were killed last year.

He had mixed feelings about the arrival of the army.

“Maybe it will finally put an end to what we have suffered,” he said.

But, he added, the way soldiers treated teenagers in some videos concerned him. “I don't like it when they abuse them.”

Yet the biggest fear for many in Guayaquil is the withdrawal of the army.

Ms Cisneros, the cook who can finally serve the meals outside, said: “They are not allowed to leave.”

Thalie Ponce reporting contributed.

It is an Indian film without song and dance. The lovers don’t say a word, their main interaction being a fleeting moment of eye contact in the monsoon rain. There are no car chases and no action stunts. The men are vulnerable. They cry.

And yet, when ‘Kaathal – The Core’, a Malayalam film about a closeted middle-aged politician, was released last month, it became both a commercial and critical success. Cinemas in the southern state of Kerala, home to the Malayalam film industry and about 35 million people, were sold out. That one of South India’s biggest stars had taken on the role of a gay man and portrayed him so sensitively sparked conversations far beyond Kerala.

Outside India, the country’s cinema is often equated with the glamor and noise of Bollywood, as the dominant Hindi-language film industry is called. But in this vast country of 1.4 billion people, there are many regional industries whose styles are as different as their languages. ‘Kaathal’ is the latest example of what Malayalam cinema has become known for: progressive stories that are low-budget, nuanced and loaded with real human drama.

What sets the film apart from other regional cinemas, observers say, is that it strikes a rare balance. Audiences in Kerala have become increasingly enthusiastic about these humble Malayalam stories of ordinary people as they are about high-adrenaline blockbusters, often imported from other parts of India.

The result has been commercial success for the kind of low-key films that are seen as experimental elsewhere, more often than not relegated to festival circuits or sent straight to streaming platforms.

“We have a great audience here,” said Jeo Baby, director of “Kaathal”. “The same audience creates success for mass films and at the same time for small films and comedies.”

The subtle storytelling of Malayalam cinema has gained more prominence in the post-Covid era. The rapid expansion of streaming services in India, which started with the pandemic, and competition for new content has created space for regional cinema to find a national and global audience.

Bollywood, for its part, initially struggled to attract audiences back to cinemas post-Covid. The recent high-grossing films are largely based on worn-out storylines, injected with more violence, increasingly slick visual effects and heavy doses of populism and propaganda. Superstars still dominate Bollywood, and an environment of censorship and self-censorship prevails.

“There is a lot more intervention there,” says Swapna Gopinath, professor of film and cultural studies at the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication in the city of Pune. “That makes it difficult for independent cinema to thrive.”

Until recently, Ms Gopinath said, Malayalam cinema was no different: there were films with big-name actors and recycled storylines, often celebrating traditional, patriarchal values.

But that changed about ten years ago multiple groundbreaking movies of young directors had great success. It was an affirmation that audiences in Kerala, which leads India in terms of living standards, were open to experimental, nuanced content.

“From that moment on, the The film landscape has changed as far as Malayalam cinema is concerned,” Ms Gopinath said. “We started making films that talked about gender and caste.”

a study of recent Malayalam films from Ormax Media, a consultancy, found that three-quarters of them were small town dramas whose protagonists were ordinary people, and not larger-than-life heroes. The topics usually are modest and local – like the messy politics of widening a small village road when everyone has a share, or a priest in a new chapel which is haunted by the history of space as a soft porn cinema.

Mr. Baby, who directed ‘Kaathal’, is known for focusing on what often goes unnoticed in everyday life. He first gained widespread recognition two years ago with “The great Indian cuisine”, a meditation on the toll of misogyny on a family.

When the writers of ‘Kaathal’ approached him with their story about the struggle of a closeted gay man, the director said he had only come up with one actor for the role: Mammootty, a 72-year-old star with a large fan following in Kerala.

He plays Mathew Devassy, ​​a retired, married bank teller with a daughter who is in college. As he prepares to contest the village elections, his wife, played by actress Jyotika, files for divorce because he knew throughout their marriage that he was gay and quietly had a male lover. The film contains courtroom scenes, but focuses on the silences in the household, the rumors circulating in the village and Mathew’s inner struggle.

Mammootty’s decision to star as well as produce “Kaathal” has helped keep the film, and the subject it deals with, in the public’s eye, Mr. Baby said.

Just five years ago, India decriminalized gay sex, and the Supreme Court recently rejected a petition to legalize same-sex marriage, although it said same-sex relationships should be respected.

Jijo Kuriakose, an artist and activist in the city of Kochi in Kerala, said “Kaathal” had sensitively dealt with the social pressures that force many gay Indians to lead parallel lives.

He said he almost married a woman about a decade ago, but instead came out to his family on the night of his engagement. His parents still urge him to marry a woman, he said.

“Okay, you are homosexual, we understand that, but marry a woman” – it has been a standard answer for years,” Mr Kuriakose said.

The film has sparked many discussions in Kerala and beyond about how caste, class, gender and religion influence the characters’ choices. Sreelatha Nelluli, a poet and translator who recently left a marriage to a closeted gay man, said the film hit especially close to home.

“I loved your expressions, constantly confused and almost scared.” Mrs. Nelluli wrote to Mammootty and Mr. Baby in an open letter. ‘You have understood and embodied this man.’

But while praising the film for “giving a voice to the voiceless”, Ms Nelluli said it had made the process of coming out quicker and easier than is actually possible. After her husband told her the truth, she said, another 15 years passed before they shared it with the rest of the family.

“When he came out of the closet fifteen years ago, I also came out with him,” she wrote.

For Mr. Kuriakose, this subtle Malayalam film was perhaps too subtle at times. He was disappointed that it never showed the intimacy of the male lovers, and that unlike heterosexual romances in most Indian films, their story had no beginning. At no point in the film do we learn how the two men met.

“Some people really enjoyed the subtle expressions,” Mr Kuriakose said. “Being a loud person, I like to see ‘unsubtle’ expressions.”

Deepa Kurien contributed reporting.