Category: Latest News

(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.

The next phase of the war will look very different from the battles fought in and around Ukrainian cities. The flatter, more open countryside of Donbas may favor Russia’s armored units and air superiority.

After meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow today, Austria’s chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said he came away feeling pessimistic about peace prospects, and that Putin intended to intensify the brutality of the war.

2. Russian conducted a campaign of terror and revenge against civilians in Bucha, Ukraine.

Our journalists spent more than a week in Bucha, the once-prosperous Kyiv suburb, documenting dozens of killings of civilians, interviewing scores of witnesses and following local investigators to uncover the scale of Russian atrocities.

As the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled in the face of fierce resistance, the occupation of Bucha slid into horror. The evidence suggests the Russians killed recklessly and sometimes sadistically before they retreated.

Related: The Biden administration is debating how much the U.S. should assist an investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague into Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Laws from 1999 and 2002, enacted by a Congress wary that the court might investigate Americans, limit the U.S. government’s ability to provide support.

3. President Emmanuel Macron will face the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff of France’s presidential election.

The final results of Sunday’s first round of voting gave 27.8 percent of the vote to Macron and 23.2 percent to Le Pen, who benefited from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration.

That puts the spotlight on Macron’s “dam” of mainstream voters: Those who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.

Macron is still favored to win re-election, but by a much smaller margin than in 2017, when he last faced Le Pen. The supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran politician who came in a strong third, could now help determine the election’s outcome on April 24.

In Mexico, a nationwide recall vote overwhelmingly supported President Andrés Manuel López Obrador remaining in office but did not draw enough turnout to be binding.

4. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm secured a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia after leaving the White House, despite a warning that the firm’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”

A panel that screens investments for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund objected to the Kushner deal, documents show. Days later, the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler — overruled the panel.

5. Elon Musk abruptly backed off plans to join Twitter’s board.

Musk, the world’s richest person, announced plans to join the board last week after becoming Twitter’s biggest shareholder. But he apparently pulled a U-turn over the weekend and then published a series of erratic tweets about the social media company that upset employees.

If Musk had taken the board seat, he would have been restricted from buying more than 14.9 percent of Twitter shares and would have been legally required to act in the interest of all shareholders. But no longer: In a new filing today, he said he was entitled to buy more Twitter shares and reserved the right to “change his plans at any time, as he deems appropriate.”

“I believe this is for the best,” Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, said. He warned employees that “there will be distractions ahead” and advised them to “tune out the noise.”

In other tech news, cryptocurrency lobbyists and executives are going state by state to seek favorable regulations and, in some cases, are even writing the bills themselves.

6. Remote work has thrown the future of commuting — along with much of New York City’s economy — into doubt.

PwC, Verizon and a host of other corporations are permanently changing the way they work, making the five-day-a-week trek into Manhattan feel like a relic. That has enormous consequences for New York, whose economy is especially dependent on filling its forests of office towers.

Eric Adams, the city’s mayor, and Gov. Kathy Hochul have stepped up their urgent messaging that the city’s roughly 1.3 million private-sector office workers need to return to their desks. But they may as well be shouting into the wind as society changes around them.

7. MacKenzie Scott’s path to becoming a billionaire philanthropist includes enough reversals of fortune to fill one of her novels.

Scott grew up privileged, though her family’s wealth was a long way from her current estimated $50 billion net worth after her marriage to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But her parents declared bankruptcy when she was a teenager, and she needed a loan from a friend to stay at Princeton, where the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison became her mentor.

After graduation, Scott worked as a waitress and struggled to make rent. She met and married Bezos while working at a financial firm and moved with him to Seattle, where they built Amazon.

Since their divorce, Scott has set about disbursing her enormous fortune with extraordinary speed. She has donated more than $12 billion to 1,257 organizations, with a goal of advancing social justice and equality, all while trying to keep herself out of the spotlight.

8. The freshwater springs of Florida’s underwater caves are at the center of a slow-motion environmental tragedy.

The world’s densest network of underground springs has fascinated humans for thousands of years, but now they are being ravaged by development, over-extraction, climate change and runoff from agriculture and sewage. Their aquifers are depleted and algae blooms have clouded the gin-clear water, depleting the larger ecosystem.

Pollution has also killed the sea grass that sustains Florida’s roughly 7,500 manatees, and many are starving to death. Extreme measures — like feeding them 202,000 pounds of romaine lettuce — may not be enough.

9. Spring is here, along with Easter, Passover and other equinox meals.

10. And finally, how a myth about starlings took flight.

In 1890, an eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin released a few dozen European starlings into Central Park, hoping to introduce all the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to America. They now number about 85 million.

But two researchers recently concluded that crucial parts of the tale are false. Schieffelin’s portrayal as a Shakespeare superfan was a nature writer’s error, and records exist of earlier European starling introductions. So what else have scientists and naturalists gotten wrong about the much-reviled bird?

Have a lofty evening.

Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.

Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

WASHINGTON — President Biden on Monday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India not to increase his country’s reliance on Russian oil and gas, officials said, part of a global effort by the United States to maintain economic pressure on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Biden also emphasized growing defense cooperation with India in a virtual meeting with Mr. Modi — a line U.S. officials have increasingly highlighted in the hopes of convincing New Delhi to come off the fence over Russia’s invasion.

In the meeting between the two leaders, Mr. Biden offered to help Mr. Modi acquire oil and other energy from other sources. The United States and its allies have been working for months to deprive President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of the financial resources generated from the sale of oil and gas around the world.

But Mr. Biden stopped well short of pressuring India to stop buying Russian oil, which amounts to about 1 percent of its imports. And American officials said the president did not ask India to condemn Russia by name for the brutal military campaign against its neighbor, a step that India has been unwilling to take since the beginning of the invasion.

“The president made clear that he does not believe it’s in India’s interest to accelerate or increase imports of Russian energy and other commodities,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters after the leaders’ meeting, which lasted about an hour.

On Monday, Mr. Modi again declined to single out Russia by name even as he condemned the apparent human rights abuses in Bucha, which the United States and others have said are evidence of war crimes.

“The news about the killings of innocent civilians in the Bucha city was very worrying,” Mr. Modi said in public remarks at the beginning of his meeting with Mr. Biden. He did not attribute the killings to Russia, but said that “we instantly condemned the killings and have called for an independent inquiry.”

India has long been reliant on Russia for military hardware, an important factor in the deep historic ties between the two countries. And so despite global condemnations of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Mr. Modi’s administration has tried to remain neutral — refraining from criticizing Russia, while calling for negotiations and engaging Ukraine with humanitarian assistance.

While American officials have been understanding of the complexity of India’s balancing act, seeing New Delhi as an important ally in the face of an assertive China, they have at times expressed frustration that India’s stance is offering Mr. Putin some cover. Some U.S. officials have warned of consequences if India expands trade with Russia, especially any increase in purchasing oil, as the West tries to tighten sanctions.

India is emblematic of the challenge facing Mr. Biden and other Western allies as they seek to expand the coalition of nations willing to punish Mr. Putin for his actions. The president has said global unity behind economic sanctions is the key to forcing the Russian leader to abandon what Mr. Biden calls his “war of choice” in Ukraine.

But while the United States has had success rallying more than 50 nations, including much of Europe, behind that strategy, India and other countries around the world have held back. India abstained when the United Nations voted to condemn the invasion in March, and again when the U.N. ejected Russia from the organization’s Human Rights Council.

That was not a surprise to Biden administration officials, according to longtime observers of India’s relations with other countries. Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the meeting on Monday underscored the careful American approach to relations with India over the past several decades.

“They understand that forcing India to make a choice is not likely to be effective and might even be counterproductive,” she said. “And so, I think I’ve seen them talk about enabling India to make choices rather than forcing India to make choices. And so they don’t talk about it publicly as choosing camps.”

That frustrates some inside and outside the administration, who believe that India, the world’s largest democracy, and other countries should be more assertive in defending the principles of national borders.

And India’s determination to stay neutral in a conflict that is roiling Europe and much of the rest of the world is likely to be an irritant in the group known as the Quad — the United States, Australia, Japan and India — whose other nations have firmly condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, said the issue highlighted the differences among the four nations even as the group professes to come together around a set of common values.

“The Quad is really about maintaining a rules-based order, and one sovereign country, in Russia, invading and destroying another sovereign country, in Ukraine, is completely contrary to a rules-based order,” he said. “And so, that’s going make future Quad meetings — and we’re going to see them later this year — a bit awkward and a bit chilly.”

But both Mr. Grossman and Ms. Madan praised Mr. Biden and his administration for trying to deal delicately with India. Ms. Madan said there was little to be gained for the United States to try to exert too much pressure on countries that have their own domestic realities.

“You want to try to attract as many people to your positions,” she said, “but also recognizing that there will be a group of countries that will not necessarily be as like-minded as you.”

“The next best thing is to try to continue your efforts to kind of align them with you,” she added, “but if not, keep them nonaligned.”

As part of that effort, Mr. Biden on Monday echoed sentiments that other U.S. officials have expressed in recent weeks in attempts to reassure India that its source of military hardware would not run dry if it took a firmer stance against Russia.

“We share a strong and growing major defense partnership,” the president said in his opening remarks, before the defense and foreign ministers of both countries sat for extended dialogue. “The United States and India will continue our close consultations on how to manage the destabilizing effects of this Russian war.”

India’s defense purchases from the United States have increased over the past decade to about $20 billion. But analysts have said expanding the ties to the point where India’s dependency on Russian military hardware would wane would take time. That would require overcoming deeply rooted hesitancy in the relationship between the United States and India that dates back decades.

In his remarks, Mr. Modi continued India’s delicate line on Ukraine — expressing concern about the suffering caused by the war but refraining from calling out Russia as the aggressor.

“Our talks today are taking place at a time when the situation in Ukraine is very worrying,” Mr. Modi said. “During this entire process I spoke several times to the presidents of both Ukraine and Russia. I not only appealed for peace, but also suggested there be direct talks between President Putin and the president of Ukraine.”

Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, and Mujib Mashal from Kathmandu, Nepal.

A planned benefit concert in support of Ukraine was canceled in Vienna on Monday amid concerns about the Russian-based ensemble it was to feature, MusicAeterna, which is led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis and is supported by a state-owned bank in Russia.

The concert, organized by the Konzerthaus in Vienna, one of Austria’s premier halls, was to take place on Tuesday and feature MusicAeterna, which is based in St. Petersburg and is financed in part by VTB Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions. The United States and other western countries have recently imposed sanctions on the bank because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Vienna Konzerthaus said it canceled the concert after the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, Vasyl Khymynets, expressed concern about featuring Russian artists at an event meant to benefit Ukraine. The ensemble’s founder, Mr. Currentzis, who was born in Athens, is a charismatic conductor who has built a large following in Russia and abroad.

“The Vienna Konzerthaus cannot ignore the political dimension of the performance of a St. Petersburg-based orchestra at a time of immense suffering caused by the Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Matthias Naske, the hall’s chief executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “We understand and share the despair over the war crimes in Ukraine and condemn this aggression without reservation.”

The Konzerthaus said that it would suspend ticket sales for future appearances by MusicAeterna until the group secured an independent source of financing. But it also said it would allow MusicAeterna to perform a separate concert planned for Monday night. (The ensemble already performed at the hall on Sunday.)

Mr. Khymynets and the Ukrainian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The cancellation of the benefit concert comes as tensions between Russia and the west continue to reverberate in the performing arts. Several high-profile Russian artists have lost global engagements in recent weeks because of their ties to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

MusicAeterna, renowned for its intense, electric performances, has come under scrutiny for its connections to VTB Bank, which has helped finance some of its tours and recording projects.

Mr. Currentzis called for peace in Ukraine in a statement issued last month by the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Germany, where he is chief conductor, though he has not directly criticized the Russian government or Mr. Putin.

“Teodor Currentzis and the members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra unequivocally support the common appeal for peace and reconciliation,” the statement said.

The orchestra has said it was aware of MusicAeterna’s association with VTB Bank, but it has continued to defend Mr. Currentzis. “From today’s perspective, this is certainly problematic, but it has existed for a longer period of time,” the statement said, referring to the bank’s support for MusicAeterna.

The benefit concert in Vienna was to feature works by Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and others.

MusicAeterna is set to perform in Germany, Austria and France in the coming weeks. Mr. Currentzis is scheduled to lead the ensemble in a production of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” at the Salzburg Festival this summer, paired with “De temporum fine comoedia” by the German composer Carl Orff.

The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, another major concert hall, said on Monday it had no plans to cancel a series of engagements this week by MusicAeterna.

Before sunrise last Friday, Oz Pearlman loosened up in front of Engineers’ Gate, one of the entrances to Central Park. He rubbed up his thighs and underarms with petroleum jelly, then peeled off his toe socks and coated his feet. This would not be a typical weekday morning jaunt through Manhattan’s preferred and most storied running terrain.

Dressed in Ukraine’s national colors, and wearing two GPS watches to record distance and time, Pearlman laced up his Day-Glo sneakers and stood in the middle of East Drive, in front of a Ukrainian flag, with a handful of spectators. He planned to run all day and into the night as he attempted to break the record for most Central Park loops completed in a single day, while raising money to help Ukrainian children displaced by Russia’s invasion of the country.

Pearlman, 39, who lives in Brooklyn, is better known by his stage name, Oz the Mentalist. (Oz rhymes with “clothes.”) He finished third on Season 10 of “America’s Got Talent” in 2015, and has appeared on “Today,” “Live With Kelly and Ryan” and “Ellen.” His long run would be yet another display of mind over matter.

The record Pearlman hoped to break was set in 2021 by Robbie Balenger, an ultrarunner who rose to prominence by knocking off multiday ultradistance challenges. In 2019, Balenger ran across the continental United States. Last summer, he completed what he called the Colorado Crush: 1,176 miles of running and over 300,000 vertical feet of elevation gain in 63 days, capped off by the Leadville Trail 100-mile race.

According to Fastest Known Time, the digital platform that collects and certifies “F.K.T.s” on terrain both well known — such as the Seven Summits — and obscure, Pearlman would have to do more than simply run one mile longer than Balenger. He would need to complete another full loop.

Although the park itself was created in 1858, the first fastest known time in Central Park was set in 2020 by Aaron Zellhoefer, who ran 11 loops in just over 14 hours. It was one of thousands of F.K.T.s established during the pandemic when races were canceled and runners were looking for new challenges. Many of those records are regional and relatively inconsequential, but this one matters to many. Central Park is a global running destination and home to more than two dozen races each year. It’s where the New York City Marathon ends.

To prepare for the Central Park Loop Challenge, Pearlman completed several runs over 20 miles, usually on the road before or between shows. When he is home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and three children, he literally runs errands, sweating through school drop-offs and pickups. He has trained in Central Park for nearly 20 years and committed every bend of the road, each hill and straightaway, to memory. “It’s home ground,” he said. “That six-mile loop is my comfort zone.”

But there would be a ticking clock. Central Park is open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., and runners are not permitted on the roads until five minutes after opening. They must be out of the park five minutes before closing time. That gave Pearlman 18 hours 50 minutes to set a record.

At 6:05 a.m. sharp, he took off hot. He ran uptown, counterclockwise, at a pace under 7:30 per mile. Mike Halovatch, a fixture in New York’s ultrarunning scene, was his only pacer for the first loop, which he finished in under 45 minutes. It would have been faster if not for last-minute advice from a stranger who insisted he walk the two big hills.

Pearlman has won the New Jersey Marathon four times and the Hamptons Marathon three times. His personal best in the marathon distance places him just outside the range of men invited to the Olympic trials.

“Oz is a true thoroughbred,” Halovatch said. Referring to Pearlman’s personal best time in the Philadelphia Marathon in 2014, he said, “You run a 2:23 marathon, that’s running.”

Pearlman wasn’t always fleet of foot. He was the lowest ranked runner on his cross-country team in high school, but by then he was already doing magic shows in restaurants. After a divorce left his parents in financial uncertainty, he said, he leaned into magic to put himself through the University of Michigan. After college, he was an entry level analyst for Merrill Lynch and moonlighted as a magician.

He worked restaurants on the Upper East Side, did bar mitzvahs and wowed colleagues at happy hour. His worlds collided during his investment banking career when he was hired to work an event in honor of a Merrill executive. When Pearlman turned a $1 bill into several Benjamins with a snap of his fingers, the boss was impressed, until he found out Pearlman worked for him.

“He said, ‘What the hell are you doing working here?’ And I thought, ‘What am I doing working here?’” Pearlman put in his notice a few weeks later, not long after running his first marathon.

He gradually shifted from standard magic to mentalism. “It’s a bit more cerebral,” he said. “It’s about trying to decipher and reverse engineer the way people think. Essentially, I’m trying to plant an idea in your head or get an impossible thought out of your head.”

He asked me to think of the name of my first crush, who happened to be someone I haven’t seen, heard from or even thought about in decades. He nailed it. While he was running. At Mile 80.

After finishing each loop on Friday, he took a question sent in from among his 812,000 Instagram followers. One asked, “Does running help your mentalism?”

“Mentalism helps my running,” he replied. “If I can get inside your brain, I can get inside my own brain when I’m suffering, dig deep and keep running.”

The sun broke through clouds on his third loop, and his pace held steady as the sky brightened and the miles piled up, much to the concern of Halovatch and his wife, Kate Pallardy, an elite distance runner and triathlete. They have learned from experience that a slower pace early usually yields a better result in this type of event. Pallardy ran 18 miles with Pearlman at midday, just five weeks after giving birth to her third child.

In total, about 40 runners came out to pace him. In typical New York fashion, many of them just happened upon Oz and joined right in. He chatted breezily, and did his best to entertain them all. “It’s the performer in me,” he said. But like Pallardy and Halovatch, he knew the suffering would begin at some point, and just before Mile 50, it hit hard.

“Your mind plays tricks on you,” he said as he finished his eighth loop. “You start thinking of how much further and how much time you have, and doubts creep in. They just eat at you. It’s your mind telling you to quit.”

Twenty miles later, on his 12th loop, his digestion faltered. He had been consuming nothing but gels (he sucked down two or three per lap), caffeine gummies and orange Gatorade. Perhaps that took its toll. Or it could have been that he had worked late the night before and managed only four hours of sleep.

He vomited twice and had to find a toilet. His pace dropped from eight minutes per mile to over 12. The color drained from his face. He felt blisters form on the bottom of his feet. His right shin started to throb. His team filled his hat with ice, which he dumped on his head to wake himself up. Once his stomach settled, he popped more caffeine gummies to keep himself humming.

As is often the case with ultra, that period of pain and deep exhaustion was chased by an extended flow state. Toward the end of his 13th lap, he hit top gear. Rocking to playlists he had curated for the occasion, he sang aloud as he ran. His 91st mile was his fastest: 6:43.

Pearlman completed his 16th loop, and 98 miles, at around 8:20 p.m., to equal Balenger’s distance record. He ran roughly four hours faster than Balenger. Two miles later, he hit 100 miles with a time of 14 hours 36 minutes, beating his own 100-mile record by two hours.

When he finished his 17th lap at 9:15 p.m. to set the Central Park Loop Challenge F.K.T., he paused to hug his wife and celebrate with friends who confirmed that he had also surpassed his fund-raising goal of over $100,000. But he wasn’t done. His pacers, some of them seasoned ultrarunners, wouldn’t let him go home. They insisted he tack on a few more laps to the new Central Park Loop Challenge F.K.T. So a few minutes later, he was running uptown once again.

On his 18th lap, he savored the slower pace and the hills because they allowed him to walk. It was obvious from his expression that his right shin was getting worse. He popped ibuprofen to keep the swelling down and the pain at bay, and kept moving.

His 19th and final loop was his victory lap. “I told the guys, we’re going to finish the way we started: strong. And I just went for it.”

He ran, all out, often with his eyes closed. It was up to his pacers to make sure he stayed on course, and they did. When he reached Engineers’ Gate for the final time just before midnight on Friday, after running a total of 19 loops and 116 miles, he fell to the ground, elated yet spent.

“I had a spectacular day,” he said. “There’s just no other way to describe it.”

Hilary Swift contributed reporting.

PARIS — A day after Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, emerged as his challenger for the final round of France’s presidential election in less than two weeks, President Emmanuel Macron immediately set about on Monday to build the “dam.”

Dams are the mainstream French voters who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but a Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.

But after Sunday’s first round, when 32 percent of French voters supported candidates on the extreme right — a record — the dam may be more precarious than ever.

Mr. Macron, widely criticized for a listless campaign, moved quickly Monday to shore it up, directly challenging Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, in the economically depressed north where she dominated Sunday.

In Denain, a city won by Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron spoke of the worries of the youth in Denain and other social issues. He tried to remind voters of the extremist roots of Ms. Le Pen’s party, referring to it by its old name, the National Front.

At a campaign stop of her own in a rural area, Yonne, Ms. Le Pen said that the dam was a dishonest strategy to win an election, adding that “it’s a way to save yourself when you don’t deserve it.’’

In a triumphant speech against the majestic backdrop of the Louvre Museum five years ago, Mr. Macron had launched his presidency by pledging to unite the French so that there would be “no reason at all to vote for the extremes.’’

But in addition to Ms. Le Pen’s second-place finish, with 23 percent of the vote, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran, won 22 percent of Sunday’s votes to finish a strong third.

Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters — split in their attitudes toward Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen — could now help determine the election’s final outcome on April 24.

After five years of Mr. Macron, who trounced Ms. Le Pen in the 2017 runoff, the far-right leader emerged stronger than ever. She has softened her image in a successful process of “undemonizing’’ and focused relentlessly on ordinary voters’ economic hardship.

In Yonne, Ms. Le Pen hammered away at the themes that carried her through to the second round. Meeting with a cereal farmer, she spoke of how rising prices of fuel and fertilizers following the war in Ukraine would raise the cost of staples at supermarkets and hurt the most vulnerable.

The far right’s record performance on Sunday resulted from a combination of factors, including Ms. Le Pen’s own efforts to revamp her image, a successful cultural battle waged by conservative forces in recent years, and a series of Islamist attacks in France since 2015.

But critics say that it also reflected Mr. Macron’s continued strategy of triangulating France’s electoral landscape. While Mr. Macron was regarded as a center-left candidate five years ago, he shifted rightward during his presidency, sensing that his main challenge would come from Ms. Le Pen.

That shift was embodied by a series of laws toughening France’s stance on immigration, empowering the police, and combating Islamist extremism. Many working French also felt that his economic policies unfairly favored the rich and have left them more adrift.

If Mr. Macron’s intention was to defuse Ms. Le Pen’s appeal by stripping her of her core issues, critics say the approach backfired by ushering the talking points of the far right deeper into the mainstream political debate.

Then, Ms. Le Pen also shifted her message to pocketbook issues that have now resonated even more broadly as energy prices spike because of the war in Ukraine.

Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker and a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s campaign, said that the president was aiming to strengthen the dam strategy. He acknowledged that there have been “some mistakes” and “blunders,” noting that some government ministers had picked up themes and expressions promoted by the far right.

But Mr. Houlié denied that Mr. Macron had normalized far-right ideas, saying his government had mainly tried to respond to people’s growing concerns on crime and immigration. “We cannot sweep the dust under the carpet,” he said, referring to the issues.

But many, especially Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters of the left, feel so betrayed that Mr. Macron may have a harder time in this next election persuading them to join his call for unity by building a dam against Ms. Le Pen, whom the president has called a danger to democracy.

Alexis Lévrier, a historian who has written about Mr. Macron’s relations with the news media, said that as Mr. Macron tried to reshape French politics around a strict divide between his mainstream movement and Ms. Le Pen, he “contributed to the rise in power of the far right.”

Unwittingly, “he’s a pyromaniac firefighter,” Mr. Lévrier said.

A resident of Guyancourt — a well-off, left-leaning city southwest of Paris where Mr. Mélenchon came in first Sunday — Stéphanie Noury said that, in 2017, she gave Mr. Macron her vote as part of a dam against the far right. But this time, she planned to stay home for the final round.

“Macron played into the hands of the extreme right,’’ said Ms. Noury, 55, a human resources manager who voted Sunday for Mr. Mélenchon. “He told himself that he would always win against the extreme right.’’

Compared to 2017, Ms. Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote went up by a couple of percentage points despite the direct challenge of a new rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who urged his supporters to vote for Ms. Le Pen in the upcoming showdown.

On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and a third far-right candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, together got 32 percent of the vote. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Dupont-Aignan collected 26 percent in the first round.

Voters first formed a dam against the extreme right in 2002 when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by making it into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Another dam helped defeat Ms. Le Pen in 2017.

To gain credibility on the right, in 2019, Mr. Macron gave his first long interview on the sensitive issues of immigration and Islam to Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that straddles the right and far right.

“By talking to us, Emmanuel Macron came to seek some legitimacy on these subjects, from right-wing people who felt he was doing nothing,” said Geoffroy Lejeune, the publication’s editor. “He knows that by doing this, he’s sending a big signal.”

Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker once allied with Mr. Macron, said the president was elected in 2017 thanks to voters who put aside their political differences and united against Ms. Le Pen.

He said Mr. Macron should have taken those votes — mainly from the left — into account in his policies afterward.

“He did not consider them,” he said, adding that Mr. Macron instead worked to “set up this cleavage’’ between him and Ms. Le Pen, leading to a “high-risk rematch.”

“There have been, on a whole range of topics, very strong concessions made to the far right,” Mr. Taché said, also citing tougher immigration rules and the application of a stricter version of French secularism, called laïcité.

But Mr. Taché, who quit Mr. Macron’s party in 2020 over the president’s shift to the right, was especially critical of the government’s landmark law against separatism, which has been criticized inside and outside France, including by the U.S. envoy on international religious freedom.

The law amounted to “making Islam and Muslims invisible,” Mr. Taché said.

Some academics, political opponents and Muslim organizations have also criticized the law as discriminating against French Muslims by leading to the widespread closing of mosques, Muslim associations and schools.

That resentment may now also complicate Mr. Macron’s dam-building effort.

To be re-elected this time, for instance, he will have to persuade voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population southwest of Paris, to join the dam against Ms. Le Pen.

A longtime stronghold of Mélenchon supporters, Trappes strongly backed Mr. Macron in the 2017 runoff. But comments by voters Sunday suggested that the dam might not be as effective this time.

Frédéric Renan, 47, a computer programmer, said he would abstain or cast a blank vote in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.

“Macron opened the door to the extreme right,’’ Mr. Renan said, adding that the president’s economic policies hurt the poor and fueled the rise of the far right.

“I don’t see how voting for Macron is a vote in a dam against the extreme right,” he said. “Some people will say that not participating in the dam against the extreme right is irresponsible, that the threat of the extreme right is greater than what Emmanuel Macron proposes, but I’m not convinced.’’

Adèle Cordonnier contributed reporting.

A year and a half after New Jersey residents voted to legalize cannabis, the state on Monday gave seven medical-marijuana companies final approval to start selling their products to all adults, opening the door to the first legal marijuana sales in the New York City region within a month.

In a meeting held by videoconference, the five-member Cannabis Regulatory Commission ushered in a seismic cultural change, making New Jersey the second state on the East Coast to fully authorize sales of cannabis to all adults.

For years, the state’s medical-marijuana dispensaries had been permitted to sell cannabis only to buyers with permission from a doctor to use the drug as medicine.

Recreational adult-use sales are permitted to start as soon as each of the seven companies pays upward of $1 million in fees associated with the expanded licenses and satisfies other bureaucratic requirements to gain a final license.

“The path to get there does not have to be any specific length of time,” said Jeff Brown, executive director of the Cannabis Regulatory Commission. “It doesn’t have to be 30 days. It can be less. It can be more.”

The commission licensed 13 individual dispensaries, which will be scattered throughout New Jersey, including several that are within a half-hour drive of New York City.

Officials said on Monday that each of the cannabis companies had demonstrated that they had enough supply for both medical and recreational customers.

The companies also had to show that they had a strategy for ensuring patients are not edged out by the expected flood of new customers during the early days of legal sales in the densely populated region.

Adult-use shops that opened in November 2018 in Massachusetts, the first state on the East Coast to permit recreational cannabis sales, were overrun by customers.

“I do expect to see some heavy lines and heavy traffic around some of these facilities,” Dianna Houenou, chairwoman of the commission, said after the votes in favor of authorizing the expanded licenses.

Ms. Houenou, who abstained from voting on the adult-use expansion, said she expected the dispensaries to work with the commission “and the towns in which businesses are located to ensure that local officials are properly informed and ready for potential lines and traffic.”

Monday’s decision applies only to seven existing medical marijuana companies, which are run mainly by large multistate and international cannabis corporations.

Smaller entrepreneurs also hoping to open recreational cannabis shops in New Jersey have filed 327 applications for retail licenses since March 15, but decisions about those applicants are not expected for at least another month.

Before the vote, officials from the seven cannabis companies explained plans to offer patient-only hours at dispensaries as well as reserved parking spots for medical-marijuana clients.

“We will have adequate supply,” said Dina Rollman, who leads government affairs at Green Thumb Industries, a medical-marijuana company with three dispensaries in New Jersey.

Its store in Paramus will be reserved for medical-use sales only, she said. Green Thumb’s dispensaries in Paterson and Bloomfield — both of which are within 15 miles of Manhattan — will be open for medical and recreational sales, she said.

Last month, the commission put off making a decision about whether to permit medical-marijuana shops to begin selling products to all adults, citing supply constraints and other concerns. The delay led to blistering criticism from lawmakers eager to open the adult-use recreational market.

Nicholas Scutari, a Democrat who is the president of the State Senate and has pressed for years to legalize marijuana, threatened to hold public hearings if recreational sales did not start soon.

“We need to get the legal marijuana market up and running in New Jersey,” Mr. Scutari said in a statement. “This has become a failure to follow through on the public mandate and to meet the expectations for new businesses and consumers.”

In November 2020, New Jersey voters approved a referendum in support of legalizing marijuana; several months later lawmakers adopted a bill making certain quantities of the drug legal and laying out broad parameters for the new industry.

New York and Connecticut followed suit, legalizing marijuana in part as a way to eliminate the wide racial gap in enforcement. (In New Jersey, for example, Black residents were more than three times as likely as white residents to be charged with marijuana possession, in spite of similar rates of usage.)

The newly created cannabis commission has spent the last year fine-tuning the regulations that will govern the new industry.

Over the last month, the commission has also given conditional approval to 102 companies that applied to either grow or manufacture cannabis. These applicants must now find a location to operate and win approval from the host town before their conditional permits can be considered valid.