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Yeong Mi Kim of South Korea delivers a stone during the women’s gold medal match between Sweden and Korea. Her beloved team won silver.

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Yeong Mi Kim of South Korea delivers a stone during the women’s gold medal match between Sweden and Korea. Her beloved team won silver.

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

In a triumph over South Korea’s much-loved “Garlic Girls,” the Swedish women’s curling team won a gold medal.

The game was one of Swedish vengeance. Nearly every time South Korea put a stone in a promising position, Sweden deftly took it out. By the fifth round, Sweden was up 4-1. Their tactics kept up, and by the eighth round, the team was up 7-3.

The Garlic Girls, affectionately nicknamed for their garlic-producing home county, were between a stone and a hard place by the ninth round. The Swedes scored another point, lengthening their lead over South Korea by five points. With one end remaining, the Garlic Girls talked among themselves and conceded the gold medal to Sweden. Both teams exchanged enthusiastic handshakes and pats on the back, among cheers throughout the Gangneung arena.

It was incredible end to South Korea’s highly-watched arch in a sport that is still unfamiliar to most South Koreans. The nation’s first women’s Olympic curling team debuted in just 2014 in Sochi.

Unlike South Korea, Sweden has had a solid presence in women’s curling. The women’s curling team took gold in both 2006 and 2010, and silver in 2014.

The Garlic Girls all hail from the small town of Uiseong, where about half of its residents are farmers. Its mayor decided more than a decade ago to use government funds to build a curling center in hopes of becoming a destination for curlers.

The team shares the same surname, Kim; two are sisters. They also share nicknames rooted in food: Captain Eun Jung Kim is “Yogurt,” and her teammates are “Pancake,” “Steak,” “Cho-Cho” and “Sunny,” for sunny side-up eggs.

The Swedish team was led by captain Anna Hasselborg in her very first Olympic appearance, with solid performances Sara McManus, Agnes Knochenhauer, Sofia Mabergs and Jennie Waahlin.

The Swedish men’s team took silver in Pyeongchang, after a stunning upset by the U.S. which earned gold. After the medal ceremony, the American men inspected their hard-earned bounty and realized that all but one of them had been given the gold medal for “women’s curling.”

The Swedish women will, presumably, be quite happy to take those off their hands.

Sridevi, Bollywood’s leading lady of the 1980s and ’90s who redefined stardom for actresses in India, has died at age 54.

The actress was described as the first female superstar in India’s male-dominated film industry. She used one name, like many leading ladies of her generation, and was known for her comic timing and her dancing skills, a great asset in the song-and-dance melodramas that are a staple of mainstream Indian cinema.

Sridevi died Saturday in Dubai due to cardiac arrest, her brother-in-law Sanjay Kapoor confirmed to Indian Express online. She had been in Dubai to attend a wedding in her extended family.

Indian political leaders and entertainers posted condolences and recollections of her work, with many colleagues and fans expressing shock at the sudden news.

“Woken up to this tragic news. Absolute shock. Sad,” tweeted Rishi Kapoor, her co-star in the 1989 film Chandni, in which Sridevi played a woman choosing between two loves.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered condolences too. “Saddened by the untimely demise of noted actor Sridevi. She was a veteran of the film industry, whose long career included diverse roles and memorable performances,” he tweeted.

Sridevi began acting as a child in regional cinema in India’s south and made her debut in Hindi-language Bollywood films in the late 1970s.

Other famous roles included Mr. India, in which she played a reporter, and Chandni, where she played a woman choosing between two men who loved her. She played dual roles of a woman and her daughter in Lamhe, or Moments in 1991.

Her impeccable comic timing and her dancing skills were front and centre in Chaalbaaz in 1989, where she played twins separated at birth.

She shared the screen with some of Indian cinema’s most iconic leading men, from Amitabh Bachchan to Shahrukh Khan. Another co-star was Anil Kapoor, her brother-in-law who was known in the West for his role in Slumdog Millionaire.

She stopped acting for several years after her marriage to film producer Boney Kapoor but made a well-received comeback in 2012 with English Vinglish, about a middle-aged woman learning English.

She is survived by her husband and two daughters.

Her last performance was the 2017 film Mom, where she played a woman seeking vengeance after her stepdaughter is raped.

Sridevi’s death is being mourned online around the world, including tributes from actors Priyanka Chopra and Akshay Kumar and English Vinglish co-star Priya Anand.

I have no words. Condolences to everyone who loved #Sridevi . A dark day . RIP

—
@priyankachopra

Shocked beyond words to hear about the sad and untimely demise of #Sridevi. A dream for many, had the good fortune of sharing screen space with her long ago and witnessed her continued grace over the years. Thoughts and prayers with the family. RIP 🙏🏻

—
@akshaykumar

We are so saddened to hear the loss of one of the greatest actresses in indian cinema.Sridevi was able to win hearts all over the world.She made a profound impact on not only the acting world but also on the people she came across.She will always be a huge pride for us Tamils♥️ pic.twitter.com/kIHrkGV4Ln

—
@priyaanandology

WASHINGTON—A Democratic memo released Saturday defended federal investigators’ handling of the surveillance of a former Donald Trump campaign adviser and rejected Republicans’ contention that the agents had a partisan motive for looking into his conduct.

The 10-page redacted memo written by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee amounts to a rebuttal of a separate Republican memo released earlier this month. That memo alleged opposition research on Mr. Trump that was partly funded by the Democratic Party was the driving…

The new details about Mr. Kushner’s security clearance, first reported by The Washington Post, emerged hours after Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would leave it up to Mr. Kelly to decide whether Mr. Kushner could continue to hold his interim clearance.

Mr. Trump’s statement set up a potential confrontation between his son-in-law and his chief of staff, who have clashed privately in recent months. In addition to the new policy he announced, which appeared meant to restrict Mr. Kushner’s ability to receive high-level national security information. Mr. Kelly has also tried to restrict Mr. Kushner’s access to the president.

“I will let General Kelly make that decision, and he’s going to do what’s right for the country,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia. “I have no doubt he will make the right decision.”

Pointing to Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine, Mr. Trump said: “General Kelly respects Jared a lot. I will let the general, who’s right here, make that call.” The president praised Mr. Kushner, calling him “truly outstanding” and “an extraordinary dealmaker.”

He noted that Mr. Kushner had been working to broker peace in the Middle East. “The hardest deal to make of any kind is between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” he said. “We’re actually making great headway.”

Mr. Kelly, who has tried to inject discipline and order into Mr. Trump’s freewheeling West Wing, has bristled from the start at Mr. Kushner’s amorphous and omnipresent role, and Mr. Kushner has been angered in turn at what he regards as challenges to his authority and access.

The strains have deepened in recent days, as Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have privately disparaged the chief of staff to Mr. Trump, faulting his handling of the scandal surrounding Mr. Porter, the staff secretary who resigned under pressure after spousal abuse allegations became public.

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Mr. Kelly’s memo further inflamed the situation, essentially suggesting that Mr. Kushner might lose the high-level clearance — including to view the presidential daily brief, a summary of intelligence and other sensitive information — that he has enjoyed for more than a year.

At his news conference, Mr. Trump blamed the federal government for the delay on the security clearance, saying there was a “broken system,” and that it took too long for White House employees to have their backgrounds screened by investigators. He complained that it had taken “months and months and months” for some of his staff members to be given their security clearances, despite the fact that some of them do not have complicated financial backgrounds — a factor that sometimes delays background investigations.

While the federal security clearance system has long been criticized as broken and has a backlog of hundreds of thousands of pending applications, senior White House officials almost always have their applications expedited so they can be cleared within weeks and perform their duties.

It is highly unusual for multiple senior officials to spend months serving with only interim clearances, a problem that Mr. Kelly privately began talking about fixing in September.

Mr. Kushner met with Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators briefly last year to discuss his dealings with the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. The interview led Mr. Kushner’s lawyers to believe that he was considered a witness, not a target, in the special counsel investigation.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration and key Asian allies are preparing to expand interceptions of ships suspected of violating sanctions on North Korea, a plan that could include deploying U.S. Coast Guard forces to stop and search vessels in Asia-Pacific waters, senior U.S. officials said.

Washington has been talking to regional partners, including Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore, about coordinating a stepped-up crackdown that would go further than ever before in an attempt to squeeze Pyongyang’s use of seagoing trade to feed its nuclear missile program, several officials told Reuters.

While suspect ships have been intercepted before, the emerging strategy would expand the scope of such operations but stop short of imposing a naval blockade on North Korea. Pyongyang has warned it would consider a blockade an act of war.

The strategy calls for closer tracking and possible seizure of ships suspected of carrying banned weapons components and other prohibited cargo to or from North Korea, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Depending on the scale of the campaign, the United States could consider beefing up the naval and air power of its Pacific Command, they said.

The U.S.-led initiative, which has not been previously reported, shows Washington’s increasing urgency to force North Korea into negotiations over the abandonment of its weapons programs, the officials said.

North Korea may be only a few months away from completing development of a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, despite existing international sanctions that, at times, have been sidestepped by smuggling and ship-to-ship transfers at sea of banned goods, according to officials.

“There is no doubt we all have to do more, short of direct military action, to show (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Un we mean business,” said a senior administration official.

The White House declined official comment.

The effort could target vessels on the high seas or in the territorial waters of countries that choose to cooperate. It was unclear, however, to what extent the campaign might extend beyond Asia.

Washington on Friday slapped sanctions on dozens more companies and vessels linked to North Korean shipping trade and urged the United Nations to blacklist a list of entities, a move it said was aimed at shutting down North Korea’s illicit maritime smuggling activities to obtain oil and sell coal.

Tighter sanctions plus a more assertive approach at sea could dial up tensions at a time when fragile diplomacy between North and South Korea has gained momentum. It would also stretch U.S. military resources needed elsewhere, possibly incur massive new costs and fuel misgivings among some countries in the region.

BOARDING SHIPS

The initiative, which is still being developed, would be fraught with challenges that could risk triggering North Korean retaliation and dividing the international community.

China and Russia, which have blocked U.S. efforts at the United Nations to win approval for use of force in North Korea interdiction operations, are likely to oppose new actions if they see the United States as overstepping. A Chinese official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such steps should only be taken under United Nations auspices.

China’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement to Reuters, said they did not know anything about the plan, but that in principle China believes U.N. resolutions on North Korea should be fully and thoroughly implemented.

“At the same time, we hope relevant countries act in accordance with Security Council resolutions and international law,” it added, without elaborating.

But Washington is expected to start gradually ratcheting up such operations soon even if discussions with allies have not been completed, according to the senior U.S. official.

U.S. experts are developing legal arguments for doing more to stop sanctions-busting vessels, citing the last U.N. Security Council resolution which they say opened the door by calling on states to inspect suspect ships on the high seas or in their waters.

Washington is also drawing up rules of engagement aimed at avoiding armed confrontation at sea, the officials said.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters in Washington on Friday the United States does not rule out boarding ships for inspections.

But U.S. officials said privately that such actions, especially the use of boarding crews, would be decided on a case-by-case and with utmost caution.

Some U.S. officials believe the risk could be minimized if Coast Guard cutters, which carry less firepower and technically engage in law-enforcement missions, are used in certain cases rather than warships.

The Coast Guard declined to address whether it might deploy ships to the Asia-Pacific region but acknowledged its ties to countries there. “Future ship deployments would depend on U.S. foreign policy objectives and the operational availability of our assets,” said spokesman Lieutenant Commander Dave French.

‘THE MORE PARTNERS WE HAVE’

A senior South Korean government official said there had been discussions over “intensified maritime interdictions,” including at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Vancouver last month where U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pressed counterparts on the issue.

“We are discussing with various countries including the U.S. and South Korea how to fully implement the sanctions, but I have not heard talk of creating a framework or a coalition,” said a Japanese defense ministry official involved in policy planning.

The Trump administration has also sought greater cooperation from Southeast Asian countries, which may have little military capability to assist but are seen as sources of intelligence on ship movements, U.S. officials said.

“The more partners we have, the more resources we have to dedicate to the effort,” said Chris Ford, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation. He declined to talk about discussions with specific countries.

Washington is especially interested in detecting of ship-to-ship transfers at sea of banned goods, something North Korea has increasingly resorted to as vessels have faced greater scrutiny of their cargo in Asian ports, the officials said.

Reuters reported in December that Russian tankers had supplied fuel to North Korea at sea in a violation of sanctions. Washington also said at the time it had evidence that vessels from several countries, including China, had engaged in shipping oil products and coal. China denied the allegation.

U.S. interception of ships close to Chinese waters is something likely to be avoided, in favor of informing Chinese authorities of banned cargo onboard and asking them do the inspection, one official said.

“It’s probably impossible to stop everything, but you can raise the cost to North Korea,” said David Shear, former deputy secretary of defense for Asia under President Barack Obama.

Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations, John Walcott in Washington, Linda Sieg and Nobuhiro Kubo in Tokyo, Josh Smith and Hyonhee Shin in Seoul, and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Mary Milliken, Paul Thomasch and Jacqueline Wong

What the dramatic courtroom scene might mean for President Trump depends on what Mr. Gates has to offer the special counsel, though at the least, the plea agreement is further evidence that the Trump campaign attracted a cast of advisers who overstepped legal and ethical boundaries. The indictments so far have not indicated that either Mr. Gates or Mr. Manafort had information about the central question of Mr. Mueller’s investigation — whether Mr. Trump or his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election.

But Mr. Gates was present for the most significant periods of the campaign, as Mr. Trump began forging policy positions and his digital campaign operation engaged with millions of voters on social media platforms such as Facebook. Even after Mr. Manafort was fired by Mr. Trump in August 2016, Mr. Gates remained with the campaign at the request of Stephen K. Bannon, who took over as head of the campaign.

From there, Mr. Gates assumed a different role — as a liaison between the campaign and the Republican National Committee — and traveled aboard the Trump plane through Election Day.

In addition to offering visibility into the Trump campaign, Mr. Gates might be able to provide prosecutors with glimpses into decision-making in the months after Mr. Trump’s election victory. Mr. Gates was a consultant on the transition team, and in the months after the inauguration, he worked with America First Policies, the main outside group supporting the Trump presidency.

Besides the agreement with Mr. Gates, the special counsel’s team has already secured guilty pleas from two of Mr. Trump’s advisers. Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide during the campaign, have both pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and agreed to cooperate with the inquiry.

Mr. Gates’s plea deal came together over the past few days, according to people familiar with the process. In a letter to friends and family, Mr. Gates said there had been false news stories about an impending plea deal over the past two weeks.

But, he added, “Despite my initial desire to vigorously defend myself, I have had a change of heart. The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circuslike atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much. I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process.”

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[Read our 2017 profile of Rick Gates »]

Testimony from Mr. Gates could give Mr. Mueller’s team a first-person account of the criminal conduct that is claimed in the indictments — a potential blow to Mr. Manafort’s defense strategy. On Friday, Mr. Manafort pledged to continue the fight.

“Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pleaded today, I continue to maintain my innocence,” he said in a statement. “I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me.”

After Mr. Gates’s plea hearing, prosecutors filed a new indictment against Mr. Manafort. That indictment did not allege new charges against him, but was done for procedural purposes as prosecutors pursue separate cases in Washington and Northern Virginia.

The court papers give few specifics about how Mr. Gates came to be charged with lying to the F.B.I. On Feb. 1, as he was negotiating with prosecutors about a possible deal, Mr. Gates misled investigators about a conversation he had with Mr. Manafort in March 2013, after Mr. Manafort had met with the congressman to discuss the situation in Ukraine. The documents do not name the lawmaker, but news accounts have identified him as Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, a Republican long known for his pro-Russia views.

Mr. Gates falsely told investigators that Mr. Manafort had told him that the subject of Ukraine had not come up at the meeting, even though Mr. Gates had helped draft a report to Ukraine’s leadership after the meeting about what had transpired, according to the court papers.

Court records detail a byzantine scheme he and Mr. Manafort employed from about 2006 to 2015 in which they funneled millions of dollars they earned from their work as political consultants in Ukraine into shell companies and foreign bank accounts. The men worked in various capacities with Viktor F. Yanukovych, the onetime president of Ukraine and a longtime ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

They then hid the existence of the companies and accounts — set up in Cyprus, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the Seychelles — from American tax authorities.

“Gates helped maintain these accounts and arranged substantial transfers from the accounts to both Manafort and himself,” prosecutors argued in the charges against Mr. Gates made public on Friday. Acting on Mr. Manafort’s instructions, Mr. Gates classified the overseas payments as “loans” to avoid having to pay income taxes.

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Mr. Mueller’s team found that more than $75 million passed through offshore accounts, and that Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million to furnish a lavish, largely tax-free lifestyle. Mr. Gates transferred more than $3 million from the offshore accounts, court documents show.

Mr. Manafort purchased multimillion-dollar homes, expensive clothing, antiques and a Range Rover. Mr. Gates used the money to pay his mortgage and school tuitions, and for the interior decorating of his home in Virginia.

The work the two men did for their firm, Davis Manafort, connected them to numerous people with ties to the Kremlin. One was Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate and an ally of Mr. Putin’s. Mr. Deripaska has been denied a visa to travel to the United States because of allegations that he is linked to organized crime operations, claims he has denied.

Court records unsealed Friday revealed other lobbying schemes, including how Mr. Manafort used offshore accounts to wire more than 2 million euros to pay a group of former senior European politicians to take pro-Ukraine positions and lobby in the United States. In an “Eyes Only” memo that Mr. Manafort wrote in 2012, the purpose of the “Super VIP” effort was to assemble a group of “politically credible friends who can act informally and without any visible relationship with the Government of Ukraine.”

After their Ukraine work was disclosed in news reports in August 2016, when Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates were working for the Trump campaign, they “developed a false and misleading cover story” to distance themselves from Ukraine, according Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors.

Then, they covered their tracks when reporting their income to the Internal Revenue Service. Two months after Mr. Manafort left the campaign, according to the court documents, his accountant emailed him a question about whether he had any foreign bank accounts.

“None,” he replied.

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Mr. LaPierre’s pugnacious appearance appeared to signal a tactical shift for the N.R.A., which had officially remained mostly quiet in the week after the Florida shooting, even as a movement of young people, including survivors of the massacre, made emotional pleas for gun control. The organization typically uses the first few days after an episode of mass gun violence to lie low before it comes out hard in opposition to any new gun control measures.

“The N.R.A. will not only speak out,” he said, “we will speak out louder and we will speak out stronger than ever before.”

Mr. LaPierre, who for around three decades has been the N.R.A.’s public face of unwavering resistance to tighter restrictions on guns, used his speech to play to the fear and mistrust that many on the right have toward government.

He raised the specter of mass gun confiscation. He accused federal agencies like the Justice Department of weaponizing their power to punish political enemies. He warned darkly that “our country will be changed forever” at the hands of socialist conspirators.

“History proves it. Every time in every nation in which this political disease rises to power, its citizens are repressed, their freedoms are destroyed and their firearms are banned and confiscated,” he said, reading slowly and deliberately from his prepared text.

Mr. LaPierre’s appearance each year at the conference, known as CPAC, is typically an event that passes without much notice. But this year, coming just a week after one of the worst school shootings in American history, CPAC seemed to take on the feel of an N.R.A. forum.

Mr. LaPierre’s name was initially left off the program. Then, on Thursday morning, the conference’s organizers released a revised schedule with both Mr. LaPierre and Dana Loesch, an N.R.A. spokeswoman, added as speakers.

Video

Outside the hall where they spoke, an N.R.A. booth was broadcasting hours of online video programming from its in-house news channel, NRATV, which the organization has used as an early-warning system to alert its followers to gun control efforts.

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Ms. Loesch, who just hours earlier had appeared subdued as she spoke softly in defense of the N.R.A. at a contentious forum in Florida hosted by CNN, reverted to the caustic, insult-lobbing persona she has cultivated on NRATV, where she is also a host.

Speaking before Mr. LaPierre, she called for more guns in schools, denounced the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as political persecutors and accused liberals of trying to sabotage the existing background check system for gun purchases.

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Ms. Loesch also blamed James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director fired by President Trump amid a dispute over the bureau’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians, for indirectly causing the Parkland massacre.

“Maybe if you politicized your agency less and did your job more, we wouldn’t have these problems,” she sneered.

Ms. Loesch also saw fault for the shooting in the news media, saying killings were always good for business. “Many in legacy media love mass shootings,” she said. “Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back.”

But the temperature on stage was noticeably hotter than in the audience, which gave Mr. LaPierre and Ms. Loesch polite but mostly unenthusiastic applause.

Mr. LaPierre evidently noticed, prompting him to comment on the stillness in the hall, which he wrote off as fear over the government oppression he warned was coming. “I hear a lot of quiet in this room,” he said. “I sense your anxiety. And you should be anxious. You should be frightened.”

He repeatedly returned to his attacks against gun control advocates as socialists lying in wait.

“And oh how socialists love to make lists,” he said, “especially lists that can be used to deny citizens their basic freedoms.”

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The Florida school shooting hung over many of the day’s speeches at CPAC. And with only small exceptions — like when Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, asked for a moment of silence for the victims — speakers directed blame and scorn on the news media.

Ben Shapiro, a conservative podcast host and author, called on reporters to stop showing the faces and printing the names of school shooters, as he said his website had done.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said he found much of the news media coverage, including the emotional outpouring at a CNN forum on Wednesday, “tiresome.”

“Every time you see a horrific crime, people in the media and Democratic politicians immediately try to leap on it to advance their agenda,” Mr. Cruz said. “And their agenda is stripping away Second Amendment rights away from law-abiding citizens.”

He noted what he said was one of the biggest moments for applause at the CNN event: “It was about confiscating guns.”

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