neighbor

HALIFAX, Canada — Several U.S. senators said Saturday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told them that the Trump administration’s plan for ending the Russia-Ukraine war that it is pressing Kyiv to accept is a Russian “wish list” and not the actual plan.

A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”

The 28-point peace plan was crafted by the Trump administration and the Kremlin without Ukraine’s involvement. It acquiesces to many Russian demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected on dozens of occasions, including giving up large pieces of territory. Trump says he wants Ukraine to accept the plan by late next week.

At a security conference in Canada, independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said they spoke to Rubio after he reached out to some of them while on his way to Geneva for talks on the plan.

King said Rubio told them the plan “was not the administration’s plan” but a “wish list of the Russians.”

“This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form,” Rounds said. “They want to utilize it as a starting point.”

Rounds said that “it looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.”

Rubio, who serves as both national security advisor and secretary of State, was expected to attend a meeting in Geneva on Sunday to discuss Washington’s proposal as part of a U.S. delegation, according to an American official who was not authorized to publicly discuss the U.S. participants before the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, denied the senators’ claim.

“As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians,” Pigott wrote on X.

The senators earlier Saturday said the plan would only reward Moscow for its aggression and send a message to other leaders who have threatened their neighbors.

The senators’ opposition to the plan follows criticism from other U.S. lawmakers, including some Republicans, none of whom have the power to block it.

“It rewards aggression. This is pure and simple. There’s no ethical, legal, moral, political justification for Russia claiming eastern Ukraine,” King said during a panel discussion at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the proposal late Friday, saying that it “could form the basis of a final peace settlement” if the U.S. can get Ukraine and its European allies to agree.

Zelensky, in an address, did not reject the plan outright, but insisted on fair treatment while pledging to “work calmly” with Washington and other partners in what he called “truly one of the most difficult moments in our history.”

In its 17th year, about 300 people gather annually at the Halifax International Security Forum held at Halifax’s Westin hotel. The forum attracts military officials, U.S. senators, diplomats and scholars, but this year the Trump administration suspended participation of U.S. defense officials in events by think tanks, including the Halifax event.

A large number of U.S. senators made the trip this year in part because of strained relations between Canada and the United States. Trump has alienated America’s neighbor with his trade war and claims that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. Many Canadians now refuse to travel to the U.S., and border states like Shaheen’s are seeing a dramatic drop in tourism.

“There’s real concern about that strain. That’s one reason why there’s such a big delegation is here,” the New Hampshire Democrat said. “I will continue to object to what the president is doing in terms about tariffs and his comments because they are not only detrimental to Canada and our relationship, but I think they are detrimental globally. They show a lack of respect of sovereign nations.”

Gillies writes for the Associated Press.

The San Antonio man accused of fatally shooting his neighbor Jonathan Joss, the actor best known for his voice work on animated series “King of the Hill,” faces a murder charge.

A grand jury in Bexar County, Texas, on Monday indicted 57-year-old Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez on a single felony count of first-degree murder, according to legal records reviewed by The Times. Legal representatives for Alvarez did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Alvarez was indicted more than five months after police arrested him on suspicion of murder in connection to the fatal shooting. Officers responded to the 200 block of Dorsey Street on the evening of June 1, where they found Joss near the roadway, according to an incident report. The report initially identified Alvarez as “Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja” and said the incident occurred on the 200 block of “Dorsey Dr.”

First responders “attempted life saving measures” until EMS officers arrived, police said. The actor, who also appeared in “Parks and Recreation,” was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 59.

Though police did not disclose details about the events that led to the shooting, Joss’ husband Tristan Kern de Gonzales alleged in a Facebook post that he and Joss suffered “openly homophobic” harassment and threats prior to the fatal shooting, which he claimed was also motivated by homophobia.

At the time, Gonzales wrote that he and Joss had returned to the site of the actor’s San Antonio home — which had burned down in January — to check their mail. The actor had also lost three dogs in the fire. Gonzalez alleged that a man approached them, “started yelling violent homophobic slurs” and “raised a gun from his lap and fired.”

He said Joss pushed him out of the way, saving his life, and added that his husband “was murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other.”

Police disputed Gonzales’ claims, writing in a tweet that “the investigation has found no evidence to indicate that Mr. Joss’ murder was related to his sexual orientation.” In a separate tweet shared in June, police said investigators “handle these allegations very seriously.”

In “King of the Hill,” Joss voiced John Redcorn, protagonist Hank Hill’s neighbor. He recorded lines for the series’ revival prior to his death. His TV credits also include “Tulsa King,” “Ray Donovan,” “Friday Night Lights,” “ER” and “Charmed.”

Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and watching. These films are edifying (and cathartic) in a way that could almost be considered a public servic and that’s what works best in James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate wake of World War II. It’s a drama that is well-intentioned and elucidating despite some missteps.

For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his “Zodiac” screenplay for David Fincher, adapts “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Dr. Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.

The film is a two-hander shared by Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley. At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad-hoc Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants. Immediately, he’s intrigued at the thought of sampling so many flavors of narcissism.

It becomes clear that the doctor has his own interests in mind with this unique task as well. At one point while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, Kelley verbalizes “Someone could write a book” and off he dashes to the library with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow. That book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis.

One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed capable of such horrors (the film grinds to an appropriate halt in a crucial moment to simply let the characters and the audience take in devastating concentration camp footage). Human beings, not monsters, were the architects of the Final Solution.

But human beings can also fight against this if they choose to, and the rule of law can prevail if people make the choice to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials start because Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn’t let anything so inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing what’s right.

Kelley’s motivations are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these men and their pathologies, particularly the disarming Göring, and in the name of science the doctor dives headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should, eventually ferrying letters back and forth between Göring and his wife and daughter, still in hiding. He finds that Göring is just a man — a megalomaniacal, arrogant and manipulative man, but just a man. That makes the genocide that he helped to plan and execute that much harder to swallow.

Crowe has a planet-sized gravitational force on screen that he lends to the outsize Göring and Shannon possesses the same weight. A climactic scene between these two actors in which Jackson cross-examines Göring is a riveting piece of courtroom drama. Malek’s energy is unsettled, his character always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting but unbalanced together.

Vanderbilt strives to imbue “Nuremberg” with a retro appeal that sometimes feels misplaced. John Slattery, as the colonel in charge of the prison, throws some sauce on his snappy patter that harks back to old movies from the 1940s, but the film has been color-corrected into a dull, desaturated gray. It’s a stylistic choice to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it’s also ugly as sin.

Vanderbilt struggles to find a tone and clutters the film with extra story lines to diminishing results. Howie’s personal history (based on a true story) is deeply affecting and Woodall sells it beautifully. But then there are the underwritten female characters: a saucy journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelley drunk to draw out his secrets for a scoop, and Justice Jackson’s legal clerk (Wrenn Schmidt) who clucks and tsks her way through the trial, serving only as the person to whom Jackson can articulate his thoughts. Their names are scarcely uttered during the film and their barely-there inclusion feels almost offensive.

So while the subject matter makes “Nuremberg” worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon) and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance. If the film is intended to be a canary in a coal mine, that bird has long since expired.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.