The Evening: An unsteady cease-fire

April 8, 2026

	By Matthew Cullen

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

Uncertainty clouds the cease-fire in Iran
Our search to unmask Bitcoin’s creator
Plus, an especially substantial emoji

A crowd of people in an urban area cheering, making gestures and holding signs, phones and small Iranian flags.

A pro-government demonstration in Tehran today. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The U.S.-Iran cease-fire is being tested

Less than 24 hours after President Trump announced a deal to pause the war with Iran and allow two weeks for peace negotiations, significant questions about the truce emerged.

Israel bombarded Lebanon, claiming that attacks on the Iran-backed group Hezbollah were not part of the cease-fire deal. In response, the speaker of Iran’s parliament accused the U.S. of not upholding its end of the deal, pointing to the Israeli attacks and a hostile drone in Iranian airspace.

Iran, too, continued its attacks on its Persian Gulf neighbors. The prime minister of Pakistan, who played a crucial role in brokering the truce, said that the violations “undermine the spirit” of the peace process. There was additional uncertainty about the Strait of Hormuz: Opening the waterway was a core American demand, but traffic seemed to remain throttled today.

The White House suggested that it was determined to declare victory and plow ahead. Officials said that Vice President JD Vance would travel to Pakistan for peace talks beginning Saturday. U.S. military leaders said they were ready to resume fighting if ordered, but doing so would come with significant political risks for Trump, our White House reporter David Sanger writes.

Iran released a 10-point plan that it described as its framework for negotiations, but White House officials said the demands did not match the private plans that Trump appeared open to discussing. One major unresolved topic is Iran’s highly enriched uranium. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded Iran turn it over, “or we’ll take it out.”

For more:

When Trump launched the war, he pledged to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, destroy its missile capability, break its regional proxies and create an opening for regime change. For now, none of those goals has clearly been accomplished.
The war did, however, wipe out much of Iran’s old leadership and push up a new generation.
Oil prices fell sharply today, but it could still take awhile for the region’s oil to flow and for gasoline prices to fall back down.

A large man in a suit stands between a man in a suit and a law enforcement officer, in front of a microphone.

Rex Heuermann at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, New York, today. James Carbone/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via Pool

The suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders pleads guilty

Rex Heuermann, the man accused of murdering at least seven women on Long Island in what became known as the Gilgo Beach killings, pleaded guilty today. His admissions, including to an eighth murder he had not yet been charged with, brought an end to a case that took investigators more than a decade to solve.

One by one, the victims’ names were read to Heuermann, 62, and he was asked how he killed them. “Strangulation,” he said, again and again. Here’s what to know about Heuermann, and the women he admitted to killing. In The Times Magazine in 2023, Robert Kolker explained why it had taken so long to find him.

A chart showing that the snowpack in the Colorado River is lower than it has been in many previous years.

Source: USDA National Water and Climate Center. Mira Rojanasakul/The New York Times

Heat wipes out snowpack in the West, heightening risks

A blistering March heat wave across the American West, coupled with an unusually warm winter, left only a tiny amount of unmelted snow in parts of the region. As a result, the West is likely to face a very dry summer, elevating the risk for wildfires and drought. Water utilities in the region have started to call for conservation.

Footage of a reporter speaking and a graphic of a cursor passing over different anonymous headshots.

Click to watch the video. The New York Times

A search for Bitcoin’s creator

A brief scene in a documentary led my colleague John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter, to spend 18 months searching for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.

He dug through the archives of a 1990s anarchist group called the Cypherpunks and used an A.I. tool to examine Satoshi’s writing. The investigation unveiled clues suggesting that a 55-year-old computer scientist named Adam Back was behind Bitcoin’s creation. Back, however, denies that he is Satoshi. Check out takeaways from our investigation here.

More top news

Politics: Clay Fuller, a Republican, won the race to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in a deep-red Georgia House district. But the vote shifted by double digits toward Democrats.
Business: Jeff Shell, the president of Paramount, is stepping down after becoming ensnared in a legal battle with a high-stakes gambler.
Court: The woman who illegally sold the ketamine that killed the actor Matthew Perry was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Jobs: The White House said Trump’s tax cuts would “deliver a Blue-Collar BOOM,” but such employment has plateaued. We talked to young New Yorkers going into construction.
Health: Patients have tried using chatbots to help them challenge medical bills. The results have been mixed.
Birds: The Hamptons has a bird flu problem.
Singapore: A celebrity photographer got rich dealing expensive watches. But was it all a Ponzi scheme?

TIME TO UNWIND

Manon Clavel as the title character in the Belgian drama “Kika,” directed by Alexe Poukine. Wrong Men North, via Film at Lincoln Center

A film festival that delivers on its premise

The New Directors/New Films festival arrives every spring with optimism, regardless of the mood in the broader movie industry. It insists that there are plenty of new or little-known filmmakers around the world producing inspired work. Christopher Nolan and Wong Kar-wai are among the many alumni of the under-the-radar festival.

This year’s edition, our critic Manohla Dargis said, features “one of its best lineups in ages.” Read more from Manohla on which films are worth seeking out.

A person reaches out to touch a metal panel with information in Braille while a crowd of others stand around looking down at it.

A Braille information plate at Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. Andy Isaacson

What sightseeing is like for those who can’t see

Travel, for most of us, is a deeply visual experience. We gaze, we photograph and we pay extra for rooms with a view. For blind travelers, it’s very different. To understand how, our writer joined a 10-day tour through India designed for the visually impaired.

The experience highlighted a more deliberate and textured way to witness the world — something we could all probably learn from. I had to smile as I read of the group’s safari to spot wild tigers: When it ended without one appearing, our sighted writer was disappointed, but a blind traveler was not — the journey itself, she said, had been thrilling enough.

Footage of Frankie Muniz looking at a small dirt bike and driving a racing arcade game.

Sela Shiloni for The New York Times

Dinner table topics

Frankie Muniz: The onetime child star is now a 40-year-old father and a NASCAR driver. He’s also back onscreen in a “Malcolm in the Middle” revival.
For us sneezers: My colleague explains what seasonal allergies do to the body.
Everyone knows Bach. But not enough people have listened to his sprawling organ collection “Clavier-Übung III.”

SOMETHING GOOD

♥️

My colleague Melissa Kirsch uses this emoji more than any other one. On her phone, it is darker and flatter than the default heart (❤️), and to her it feels more substantial. She included that tidbit in her newsletter of delight, called The Good List, because the group that standardizes emojis is looking for new ones. Make a pitch — or simply learn more about how we