The U.S. attorney general visits Ukraine to discuss Russian war crimes.

WASHINGTON — The United States attorney general, Merrick Garland, is making an unannounced trip to Ukraine on Tuesday to discuss the prosecution of Russians for war crimes, according to his spokesman.

Mr. Garland plans to meet with Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, “to discuss U.S. and international efforts to help Ukraine identify, apprehend and prosecute those individuals involved in war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine,” the spokesman, Anthony D. Coley, said in an email.

The meeting is expected to last about an hour, and the two are expected to discuss technical, forensic and legal support that Mr. Garland’s department might be able to provide prosecutors in Ukraine, department officials said.

Midway through primary season, the party has nominated several candidates who deny the 2020 outcome for posts that will have significant sway over the 2024 presidential election.

The potential for far-right Republicans to reshape the election systems of major battleground states is growing much closer to reality.

As the halfway point nears of a midterm year that is vastly friendlier to Republicans, the party’s voters have nominated dozens of candidates for offices with power over the administration and certification of elections who have spread falsehoods about the 2020 presidential contest and sowed distrust in American democracy.

The only way to restore trust, these candidates say, is by electing them.

Former President Donald Trump has filed papers in court as part of his ongoing effort to avoid testifying in an investigation of his business practices in New York.

The former president filed papers U.S. District Court in Albany in response to a ruling Friday by Judge Brenda K. Sannes, who dismissed Trump's effort to fight a subpoena issued by New York attorney general Letitia James, reported Insider.

The notice of appeal shows Trump plans to ask the federal appeals court to reverse the judge's decision.

James argued that her office has uncovered "substantial" evidence of financial wrongdoing and self-serving falsehoods in a decade's worth of Trump business filings.

I know that stoning people to death is barbaric. But I never understood just what it entails — the slow, cruel process by which a defenseless human being is degraded and destroyed — until I saw a series of photographs taken by Somali photojournalist Farah Abdi Warsameh, which depict the stoning execution of a man accused of adultery by the insurgent group Hizbul Islam. While some charge that viewing such pictures is voyeuristic, these images made me face the terror, the blood and the sheer cruelty of this practice — one that, astonishingly, has not yet been tossed into the dustbin of history.

Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering — and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates — in ways that words do not. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body — frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) — look like? What can we know of another’s suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden — or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then?

These are questions that are being raised in the wake of last week’s mass shooting of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, which has plunged much of the country into an abyss of sorrow, rage and despair. On social media and in the press, some, including the former homeland security chief Jeh Johnson, have suggested that photographs of the slaughtered children, whose faces and bodies were apparently mutilated beyond recognition, be released to the public in hopes of garnering support for gun control legislation.