Terry Renna/AP

Police crime-scene vehicles are seen at Trump International Golf Club after an apparent assassination attempt against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in West Palm Beach, Florida, Sept. 15, 2024.

Two months after the Secret Service faced widespread blame for its failure to stop an assassination attempt targeting former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, the agency demonstrated alertness in forestalling what the FBI has characterized as a second assassination attempt in Florida Sunday afternoon. But the fact that someone with a semiautomatic rifle was able to get within 500 yards of Mr. Trump has raised urgent questions about the Secret Service’s ability to provide adequate protection under its current budget and approach.

While the Republican presidential nominee was out golfing at his club in West Palm Beach, Secret Service agents a few holes ahead of him noticed the muzzle of a rifle poking out from the tree line. They fired at the would-be gunman, who fled the scene in a vehicle. 

The suspect, identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, left the rifle behind, along with a scope and a GoPro camera, according to The Associated Press. Local law enforcement were able to apprehend him within minutes of being alerted by the Secret Service, FBI, and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office – which were aided by a vigilant citizen who had taken photos of the suspect and his vehicle.

Mr. Routh did not have a clear line of sight to the former president, and did not fire any shots at the Secret Service, according to a Monday afternoon press conference with local and federal law enforcement. But he had been in the immediate vicinity for roughly 12 hours. The FBI said it is investigating the incident as an apparent assassination attempt.

The leaders of a bipartisan congressional task force investigating the July 13 assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, said they were monitoring the situation and had requested a briefing with the Secret Service. Mr. Trump was scheduled to be briefed by the acting director of the Secret Service on Monday.

Over the past decade, the Secret Service has been dogged by chronic understaffing, an intensifying threat environment, and a growing number of people to protect – including the multigenerational Trump and Biden families. Back-to-back brushes with assassination attempts at a volatile time in America underscore the urgency of implementing additional security measures while any systemic issues are investigated. Mr. Trump, despite his unusual position as both a former and potentially future president, does not receive the same protection as a sitting president, for whom such a golf course’s perimeter would have been lined with agents. 

“Two assassination attempts in 60 days on a former President & the Republican nominee is unacceptable,” wrote Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a California progressive, on the social media platform X Sunday night. “The Secret Service must come to Congress tomorrow, tell us what resources are needed to expand the protective perimeter, & lets allocate it in a bipartisan vote the same day.”

Ryan Wesley Routh: interested in Ukraine

A resident of North Carolina and then, since 2018, Hawaii, Mr. Routh had expressed support for Mr. Trump on social media but later seemed to grow disaffected. In recent years, he expressed support for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the AP. A man by the same name was convicted in 2002 for possession of a “weapon of mass destruction” – a fully automatic machine gun – the wire service reported, citing a 2002 news report regarding the weapon. 

Mr. Routh also grew keenly interested in the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. He claimed to have traveled to Ukraine and said he was trying to recruit foreign fighters for the cause. He gave interviews last year to several U.S. media outlets about his efforts.

At the time of the Sunday incident, Mr. Routh was hidden in some shrubbery less than 500 yards away from the president – well within range to fire accurately with a scope. His apparent attempt to shoot, though not successful, underscored long-standing Secret Service concerns about the security challenges posed by golf courses.

Leaders condemn political violence

The barely averted violence could ratchet up tensions for both campaigns in the presidential contest, in which polls show Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris virtually tied with less than two months to go. 

Mr. Trump, who in last week’s presidential debate had blamed Democrats’ rhetoric for motivating the July shooting, reassured followers in a social media post that he was safe and well. He added, “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”

On Monday, Mr. Trump told Fox News Digital that the would-be gunman “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” saying, “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at.”

His opponent, Ms. Harris, released a statement saying she was “deeply disturbed” by the incident and was thankful that Mr. Trump was safe. “We all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence,” she said, commending the Secret Service and law enforcement for their vigilance and vowing that the agency would have every resource it needs to carry out its mission.

Congressional leaders also decried the incident and the rising threat of political violence. “We are thankful the President was not harmed, but remain deeply concerned about political violence and condemn it in all of its forms,” Chair Kelly and Representative Crow said in a joint statement.

Investigations of the Secret Service underway

But headed toward an election that both sides have described in existential terms, each side says the other has primed its supporters for more potentially violent acts.

In that environment, the ability and preparedness of the Secret Service to do its job have come under fresh scrutiny. The first congressional hearing into the July shooting with the agency’s then-Director Kimberly Cheatle was so disastrous that she resigned the next day, despite having vowed repeatedly that she would not. 

As the Monitor reported at the time, a local law enforcement sniper took notice of Thomas Matthew Crooks an hour before he shot at the former president. Yet the Secret Service failed to stop him until he fired – wounding Mr. Trump, who happened to turn his head moments before, in the ear. Early reports blamed the low number of agents deployed (three), the lack of a joint briefing with agents and local law enforcement, siloed communication channels, and a decision not to use aerial surveillance, among other things.

The Secret Service has 8,000 personnel and a $3.1 billion annual budget, and many lawmakers have questions that go beyond why it failed July 13. A key concern is chronic understaffing. The number of employees assigned to protect senior figures has dropped about 10% over the past decade while the number of people it has to protect has increased, NBC News reported in July, citing congressional budget numbers. 

“The Secret Service operates under a paradox of zero-fail mission, but also that we have done more with less for decades,” said U.S. Secret Service acting Director Ron Rowe at a press conference Monday afternoon in Florida. He said that after the July shooting, he had ordered a paradigm shift, from a reactive model to a readiness model.

Indeed, the agency immediately stepped up its protection of Mr. Trump, whose team was earlier denied assets it had requested – though not on that particular day. Mr. Rowe said that the increased assets in place Sunday included countersniper, countersurveillance, and counterassault team elements, as well as counterdrone elements. In addition, the former president now speaks behind bulletproof glass at rallies. 

Congress is digging in to what happened at the July rally through a number of investigations, including by the House Oversight Committee, which held the hearing with Ms. Cheatle on July 25. The Senate Homeland Security Committee, which held its first – and so far only – hearing July 30, is also probing the matter, as is the House task force led by Representatives Kelly and Crow, who together with the rest of the committee members were appointed by their parties’ respective leaders.

None of those three bodies have produced a report of their findings. The office of GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Homeland Security Committee member, compiled preliminary findings about the July assassination attempt, and issued a more thorough time line in late August. 

According to that time line, the first time law enforcement noticed the would-be assassin was an hour and 45 minutes before the shooting. 

The Secret Service will still have a lot to answer for as Congress continues its investigations into whether the July shooting revealed systemic problems, with this latest incident further underscoring the scope of the challenges.

“We cannot have failures,” said Mr. Rowe, the acting director, who was on Capitol Hill just last week. “And in order to do that we’re going to have some hard conversations with Congress, and we’re going to achieve that.” 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated on Sept. 16, 2024 – the date of initial publication – to reflect newly emerging details, and to correct a description of the scene where the Secret Service saw a threat to the former president.

Mark Humphrey/AP

Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference July 27, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. A skeptic four years ago, Mr. Trump wholly embraced cryptocurrency in July, calling for a national strategic reserve of the digital money.

Cryptocurrency, once on the fringe of finance, is poised to have a breakout year in 2025. Already, one version of cryptocurrency handles more money daily than the entire Visa credit card system. And both presidential candidates as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress increasingly recognize the potential and pitfalls of this new and rapidly growing form of money.  

On Monday, former President Donald Trump is expected to underscore cryptocurrency’s prominence as he publicly announces the launch of his sons’ crypto project, known as World Liberty Financial. 

Crypto was originally conceived as a digital currency that would democratize both investment and lending. Instead of securing value and transactions through government involvement, it did so through innovative technology, allowing funds to zip around the world at high speed and low cost.

That could be a boon to commerce but has also attracted unsavory elements – from Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent FTX company, which collapsed in 2022, to drug cartels and terrorist organizations that have found refuge in a shadowy cryptocurrency underworld. 

Now, legitimate crypto companies are trying to distinguish themselves from “bad boy” operators. So a growing swath of players in this nascent high-tech industry, which was once proudly nonconformist, is now pushing for the opposite: federal regulation.

Increasingly, U.S. lawmakers are listening. With the crypto world growing in size and influence, they worry that another high-profile collapse of a fraudulent crypto exchange or currency could wreak havoc on the traditional financial system. Also, pro-crypto legislators want to ensure that the United States maintains its lead in a new and potentially transformative digital technology.

“We have to have a complete regulatory framework so the industry doesn’t move to Europe,” says Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican and cryptocurrency backer on the Senate banking committee. She expresses cautious optimism that she and her colleagues may be able to advance legislation before the new Congress begins in January. “But certainly next year will be an important year for digital assets.” 

Mariam Zuhaib/AP/File

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., speaks during a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee hearing, April 5, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Senator Lummis, a cryptocurrency advocate, also sits on the Senate banking committee, which plays a role in determining the currency's future.

The latest evidence of growing interest comes from the presidential campaign trail. Current GOP nominee Mr. Trump, a skeptic four years ago, wholly embraced cryptocurrency in July, calling for a national strategic reserve of the digital money. Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris has not addressed the topic, but her staff has reached out to the industry, and her campaign, like Mr. Trump’s, is benefiting from funding by pro-crypto groups. On Friday, a group of crypto supporters for the Democratic nominee called Crypto4Harris held the first of at least five fund-raisers for her.

An emerging industry or a Ponzi scheme? 

The increasing political attention and the stepped-up fundraising and lobbying by segments of the industry suggest that Congress may finally be ready to regulate the industry in a comprehensive way, replacing the current piecemeal approach by federal and state regulatory agencies.  

Regulation could also help the industry by making it harder for fraudsters to operate, research suggests. Last year, losses from cryptocurrency schemes rose nearly 50% from the year before and defrauded Americans of more than $5.6 billion, according to the FBI. One study found that more than 70% of the trades at cryptocurrency exchanges not regulated by a state were illusory – involving purchases and then immediate sales to boost artificially the exchanges’ volume of sales. Another study found that requiring periodic releases of information makes exchanges more efficient and manipulation more difficult.       

Such problems feed into cryptocurrency skepticism, which remains widespread. Critics call the digital money a giant Ponzi scheme, which benefits no one except criminals.

“There’s no there there,” says Joel Mokyr, economic historian at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. People trust currencies – dollar bills or euro notes – to hold their value because they’re issued and backed by responsible governments. By contrast, confidence that a string of computer code will hold its just because others trust in it has the makings of a financial bubble, he adds. “It will collapse on its own.”

Challenges of regulation

Part of the challenge for legislators is that while cryptocurrency is easy to define, it’s hard to categorize.

Jonathan Drake/Reuters

Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris holds a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Sept. 12, 2024. Ms. Harris has not addressed the topic, but her campaign is benefiting from funding by pro-crypto groups.

A cryptocurrency is a form of digital money that also automatically tracks each transaction. Those transactions are recorded in a way such that anyone can look them up and verify them through a technology known as blockchain. That makes the currency hard to counterfeit. 

Thanks to such security and transparency, cryptocurrency’s popularity has soared. And since new cryptocurrency is minted through a process that requires a lot of time, energy, and expensive computer power, its supply is limited. Growing demand and limited supply has caused the value of many of the most popular versions of these currencies to explode. The first and most popular version, bitcoin, was worth a tiny fraction of a penny when it was first traded in 2009; today, a bitcoin is worth more than $55,000.

With market forces, not government, determining value, many people are piling into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with fluctuating values. They hope their value will go up, like a speculative stock. Others buy them as a hedge against inflation, like gold. This multiuse makes it harder to regulate bitcoin and its competitors. Should they be overseen like stocks are? Or like commodities, similar to copper or oil? Or do they require a completely new federal agency to regulate them? 

Another version of cryptocurrency, known as stablecoins, is more straightforward. Their value is tied to a real currency, often the U.S. dollar. If widely adopted, they could zip dollars or euros or Chinese yuan around the world, speeding international commerce and personal transactions alike – for example, allowing immigrants to send money back home at low cost.

But the same technology also fosters illicit activity, whether it’s foreign nations evading Western sanctions or criminals moving money without the hassle of suitcases full of cash. A Wall Street Journal investigation published last week found that a dollar-linked stablecoin called tether allows internet scammers, Hamas, and other U.S.-designated terrorist organizations to launder money. Tether transactions already outpace Visa. 

That’s why some in the crypto industry believe stablecoins will be the first target for comprehensive legislation. Backers of the technology say Congress has the opportunity to encourage legitimate digital commerce while cracking down on digital crime. 

It’s always a challenge for Congress to keep pace with rapidly developing and complex technologies. But Washington’s understanding of cryptocurrency “has grown leaps and bounds over the last few years,” especially stablecoins, says a crypto industry executive who requested anonymity so he could speak candidly about the political landscape for cryptocurrency.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are generally ahead of their Democratic colleagues in understanding the technology’s potential. But Democrats are more likely to push for regulation that would rein in companies that have shoddy or illicit finance controls. To be effective, the executive adds, “this actually needs to be bipartisan.” 

And so far, it has been. “There are members of Congress on both sides of the aisle that see this [potential legislation] as a win-win,” says Tonya Evans, a law professor at Penn State University and author of the book “Digital Money Demystified.” “I’m actually more optimistic right now” than a year ago about legislation in 2025, she adds.

The presidential election may nudge Congress in that direction. If Mr. Trump wins, he is expected to push for crypto-friendly legislation and end the aggressive stance that the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has taken against some crypto companies. Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts say Ms. Harris, while mum on the subject so far, is more amenable to high-tech innovation than President Joe Biden, given her background in California politics.

“We’re really reading the tea leaves, but I’ve been heartened,” says Ms. Evans, a speaker at a Crypto4Harris event last month. “You don’t win statewide elections on several occasions in California without being tech-forward.”

Staff writer Christa Case Bryant contributed to this story from Washington.

You’ve probably heard references to “the grid.” Every week, it seems, there is news from somewhere around the United States about the power grid’s reliability – or lack thereof.

We read about its stress under heat waves and its vulnerability to cold spells. Congress holds hearings about its resilience and whether it can adapt to a world of clean energy. News articles discuss the “smart grid” and the “flexible grid” and what a “next-generation grid” might entail. We hear messages about how “electrify everything” is the climate priority, but we also get warnings that electricity demand is already pushing the grid to the breaking point. 

And then there are electric bills. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2022, the average residential bill increased 13% over 2021, well above overall inflation. For the most recent 12 months (ending in June), the pace is slower, but electricity costs have jumped another 4.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One explanation: Utilities needed extra money to pay for the grid.

What, actually, is the grid?  

The easy answer is that it is our fundamental power infrastructure, which supplies electricity for everything from household lights and refrigerators to the internet, data centers, and hospitals. But go deeper, and one ends up quickly in a jumble of regulatory authorities, utilities, wires, power plants, early-20th-century technologies, and cutting-edge science – as well as big questions about what power and life should look like in the 21st century.

To start, it’s important to remember that what we call “the grid” is a physical thing, sometimes called “the largest machine in the world.” And the first part of this machine’s operation is power generation. This might be a coal power plant, or a big solar array. Power generators capture energy in some way – from the sun or wind or fossil fuels or rushing rivers – and turn it into electricity. 

This electricity then travels over transmission lines. These cables carry high-voltage electricity over long distances from the power generators to local substations. Substations, then, convert this high-voltage electricity to a lower voltage that can be used by homeowners and businesses. That lower-voltage electricity travels across distribution lines to the end user. 

What’s so complicated about the grid?

The thing is, there’s not really just one grid in the U.S. Broadly speaking, there are three systems of power generation, transmission, and distribution – one in the East, one in the West, and one in Texas. And within those three systems, there are local grid operators. These are typically the utilities, which can either be set up as private companies or customer-owned cooperatives. 

The grid operators’ job is to make sure the grid is balanced – to ensure not only that there is enough electricity going to where it is needed, but also that there isn’t excess electricity flowing through cables. Remember, we’re talking about physical objects here. If wires are overloaded with electricity that doesn’t have a home, a bunch of things can go wrong, from tripped circuits to overheated cables and fire risk.

That means not only minute-by-minute adjustments are required, but also long-term maintenance, planning, and build-out of all those electric lines and substations. In some places, there are regional groups that help strategize and coordinate the grid operators – and, in some areas, allow for wholesale energy suppliers, which can take the form of private companies competing to sell consumers their electricity. (The regional utilities generally still manage and deliver that electricity.) It gets complicated, but the takeaway here is that the three big U.S. grids could be seen as a collection of lots of little grids, all with different management structures, power sources, goals, and profit incentives.  

“It’s not uniform across the country,” says Jennifer Chen, senior manager for clean energy at the World Resources Institute. “Different regions have different systems.”

And that, say grid experts, is increasingly a problem – especially as extreme weather creates regional spikes in electricity demand.

“The grid is not large enough. And because it’s not large enough, and because the different regions of the country are not as well connected together as they should be, the grid isn’t as resilient as it should be, and therefore our health and economy is at risk,” says John Moore, an energy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have enough power in our country. To the contrary, says Mr. Moore, we have enough power to fuel our needs, whether that’s for increased use of air conditioning in a heat wave or for a data center. The trick is getting it from point A to point B. 

Doing this becomes increasingly complicated as energy generation shifts from fossil fuel-based power plants to clean-energy sources such as wind and solar power, which tend to be located farther away from population centers. It also gets more complex as demand for power increases because of factors such as the growing digital economy and the rising number of electric vehicles. 

How do we fix the problems with the grid?

To carry electricity over longer distances, we need more transmission lines, Mr. Moore says. Indeed, he says, studies have shown that if the country had enough lines, we could have a reliable, nearly carbon-free electric system by 2035.

Ms. Chen says we should also think more strategically about where we locate industries that consume large amounts of electricity. It might make more sense to locate a data center, for instance, in the wind-rich Great Plains, where there is often so much wind energy that the grid can’t even absorb it, than in northern Virginia, the current hub of U.S. data centers.

We can also increase the efficiency of our existing system, Ms. Chen says. In many places, grid infrastructure is almost a century old. New wire technology, for instance, would allow for more electricity to travel much farther distances along existing lines.  

But at the moment, experts say, there is less financial incentive for utilities to upgrade and maintain lines than to take on expensive new capital projects and build out new infrastructure. That’s a policy and structural issue many grid experts think must change.

Overall, Mr. Moore says, the grid of the future will have to become even more connected and integrated. It will have to be larger than the systems that generate power, like solar and wind, so that if there are clouds in one area, sunshine elsewhere can still help keep the lights on. That also means that if one region is seeing a spike in demand because of, say, a heat wave or storm, areas with more moderate weather and lower demand could pass along their extra electricity.  

But there are big grid updating projects in the works. This summer, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would spend $2.2 billion on eight grid projects across 18 states, part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s grid resilience and innovation partnerships program. That includes funding for new, large transmission lines; technology to improve the connection between the eastern and western grids; and infrastructure to bring the power from wind farms off the coast of New England into Massachusetts and Connecticut.

“The first half of 2024 has already broken records for the hottest days in Earth’s history,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a press release. “As extreme weather continues to hit every part of the country, we must act with urgency to strengthen our aging grid to protect American communities.”

At the glitzy Buenos Aires tango world championship, couples glide across the stage in the classic moves of Argentina’s national dance. Men with smoldering eyes and tight, dark suits lead their female partners – in their obligatory stiletto heels – turning and grasping them close. A woman’s bare leg occasionally rises provocatively up the man’s thigh, as musicians sing of romance and betrayal.

Elsewhere in Buenos Aires, in working-class-turned-hipster neighborhoods of the capital, local cultural centers host tango evenings and master classes called milongas with a strikingly different vibe.

The recorded music and the dance steps are recognizably tango, but the couples, some in jeans and sneakers, hint that this is something distinct. In some, women dance with women, or men dance with men, and in the mixed-sex couples, the women often lead the men.

“Now change roles!” shouts a tango instructor at one milonga in the Boedo neighborhood, prompting men and women who were leading their partners to shift physically and mentally. “If you were leading, it’s now your turn to follow!”

The come-as-whoever-you-are tango events sprung up a couple of decades ago, initially as “feminist tango.” In the lead were Argentine women who loved the music and dance they grew up with, but rejected the national art form’s macho, and sometimes violently misogynistic, lyrics and steps.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Dancers participate in a tango master class at the Centro Cultural Macedonia on Aug. 18, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's common for instructors to call out "change roles" at these inclusive milongas.

Soon, “gay tango” joined in. Today, fliers and social media posts use labels including “dissident tango” and “inclusive tango,” while a growing number of the nontraditional lessons and events use “queer tango” – increasingly accepted as the most all-are-welcome way of describing the fluid and open atmosphere of the events.

Whatever they call it, those promoting an alternative approach to tango say its overarching purpose is to make a beloved national cultural icon accessible to everyone – even those who don’t see themselves or their values reflected in much of the traditional tango world.

“I loved tango and wanted to be able to participate in something that is such a rich part of our national expression,” says Mariana Ocampo, one of the pioneers of Buenos Aires’ queer tango scene who first ventured onto the tango dance floor with her female partner in the 1990s.

“Compelled to do something”

During a break from DJing a recent milonga in the Almagro neighborhood’s Centro Cultural Macedonia, Ms. Ocampo recalls a time when bystanders would throw things or push people off the dance floor to deter an individual from dancing with a same-sex partner. She says she “rejected some of [tango’s] undeniable elements like misogyny,” citing popular songs that dwell on the male need for a beautiful and subservient female partner. Such lyrics left her yearning “to create the spaces where tango could be for everyone.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Mariana Ocampo selects the music for a milonga at the Centro Cultural Macedonia on Aug.18, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ms. Ocampo co-wrote the first queer tango called "La Marshall" and has been working for decades to make the Argentine tradition more inclusive.

Tango originated in the poor and immigrant-dominated port neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and nearby Montevideo, Uruguay. Both the music and the dance were born in the bars and brothels frequented by stevedores and other laborers in the 1880s, and were not widely accepted as a national art form until tango had crossed the Atlantic in the early 1900s, and became all the rage in European dance halls from Paris to Berlin.

Over the past two decades, Ms. Ocampo says, Argentine society has undergone an “evolution in thought” when it comes to tango, alongside a “social revolution” ushered in by the nation’s powerful women’s movement.

Indeed, LGBTQ+ rights have expanded, and Argentina’s feminist leaders – among the most powerful in Latin America – gained attention for organizing the Ni Una Menos movement against sexual violence in 2015 and the successful campaign to legalize abortion in 2020.

This tension between how Argentine women thought of their role in society and how they saw themselves portrayed in traditional tango drove tango singer and musician Camila Arriva to break molds.

“I’ve loved singing tango since I was a little girl, but it was the beautiful songs of some of the great early female singers,” she says of vocalists who reigned in the 1920s and ’30s.

As a young artist emerging in the early 2000s, she realized those songs were gone, “replaced too often by … lyrics about the man killing his unfaithful woman,” she says. “I felt compelled to do something to change that.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Tango composer, musician, and feminist Camila Arriva discusses tango at the historic Cafe Tortoni on Aug. 16, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Her solution was to create a female (and feminist) tango orchestra called Mujeres, which includes a pianist, bassist, and a bandonionist, who plays an instrument similar to an accordion. They perform across Argentina and internationally.

Around the same time in the early 2000s, Ms. Ocampo was pioneering the first feminist tango venues. Later, she joined tango instructor Augusto Balizano to create one of the capital’s best-known gay milongas.

Liliana Furío, another prominent tango innovator, describes a yearslong transition in nomenclature from feminist to “disruptive,” before finally settling on queer tango. “The objective all along was to retain the beauty of tango and its roots in working-class resistance, while removing the machismo and stereotypes that had hardened over time,” she says.

Tango for everyone

Out on the Centro Cultural Macedonia’s hardwood dance floor, Leandro Orellano’s concentration is visible as he switches from leading to following the lead of his female partner.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Leandro Orellano (back right) listens to instructor Augusto Balizano (back left) during an inclusive tango master class in Buenos Aires. Those promoting an alternative approach to tango say its goal is to make a beloved national cultural icon accessible to everyone.

“I think the easing away from traditional roles and a traditional conceptualization of tango can” make tango “accessible to everyone,” he says while taking a break from dancing.

He says shifting back and forth from leading to following is as much a mental process as it is physical. That can make it difficult for some.

Despite the blossoming of inclusive tango, some worry a political climate that ushered in new conservative president Javier Milei could portend a backlash.

“When we have a government that demonizes the feminist and sexual minority movements, there should be no surprise when suddenly we see a proliferation of hostile attitudes and even actions,” says Ms. Furío, who has produced documentaries on queer tango.

“There is a sense of tolerating us. But at the same time there’s a new willingness to consider us strange and somehow offensive to Argentina,” she says. “Unfortunately, we’re already seeing how this discriminatory discourse can have tragic impacts,” she says, pointing to a case earlier this year when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into the home of four lesbian roommates here. Three of the women died in what activists believe was a hate crime inspired by the president’s antigay rhetoric.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

People dance at an inclusive milonga at the Centro Cultural Macedonia on Aug. 18, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

For Mr. Balizano, the tango instructor, the bigger threat may come from harsh economic austerity measures, which he says have hit both cultural activities and health services particularly hard.

After his husband had a stroke, Mr. Balizano worked with the rehabilitation center to develop a tango class for people with disabilities, using public funds.

“Making tango accessible to people who might have never thought it possible had real benefits for mind and body,” Mr. Balizano says. Then came Mr. Milei’s funding cuts; the classes were eliminated.

Still, many participants in the come-all milongas insist it will be difficult to reverse the new inclusivity of Argentina’s iconic art form.

“If you look around this city, you see there are more queer tangos all the time,” says Mr. Orellano. “What I think this tells us is that people do not want to go backwards.”

REUTERS

A Ukrainian serviceman patrols an area in Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, Aug. 16.

Six weeks into its military incursion in Russia, Ukraine has shown why it is not really seeking territorial conquest. On Monday, it invited the International Committee of the Red Cross to inspect whether Ukrainian soldiers have followed the rules of war as an occupying force over foreign civilians.

“Ukraine is ready to ... prove its adherence to international humanitarian law,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga wrote on social media.

In other words, having taken the military high ground in Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine now seeks the moral high ground in the court of world opinion.

Since the war began in early 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine must fight by the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which have been adopted by nearly every country and are administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. By safeguarding Russian civilians and prisoners of war in Kursk, Ukraine can convince more countries not to support Russia in any way.

Ukraine’s qualitative difference from Russia’s reckless treatment of Ukrainians has become a force unto itself. Ukraine relies on a principle of law calling for the protection of innocent noncombatants as well as wounded or captured troops on the battlefield. “It is important for us not to be like those who brought war with looting and rape to us,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in late August.

Abiding by the rules of war has another effect for Ukraine. It boosts the morale of its soldiers.

“When soldiers are well-led, and engage in ethical conduct in war (as brutal as that might be at times), it keeps them human in the most terrible of circumstances, and also protects their souls,” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and military analyst, wrote on the social platform X about Ukraine’s compliance with the rules of war.

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions. While often ignored in many of today’s nontraditional conflicts – such as in Gaza – the rules of war are still highly discussed among nations, indicating a preference to use law to limit wars to combatants and to spare the innocent.

“International norms are guidelines that tell states which actions are and are not appropriate and provide metrics against which to judge others’ conduct,” Tanisha M. Fazal, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, wrote in Foreign Affairs.

“The norm against territorial conquest didn’t stop Russia from invading Ukraine,” she added, “but it does help explain why Moscow is paying such a high price for its land grab.”

Principles do have power, Dr. Fazal wrote, and beneath the surface of war, “Norms in fact work as a powerful motivator and constraint.”