A Cease-Fire Begins

A cease-fire is in effect in Gaza, Israel said. Its soldiers were repositioning themselves after the government approved a deal that may end the war.

The deal includes the release of all hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, as well as an initial pullback by the Israeli military in Gaza. President Trump is planning his victory lap. He’s headed to a formal signing in Egypt this weekend and will speak before Israel’s Parliament. The parties will exchange hostages and prisoners early next week, Trump said.

Many of the agreement’s details remain in flux. Here’s what we know so far:

• The agreement addresses only a few of the 20 points in a plan Trump proposed last month. Some of the thorniest issues — like whether Hamas will disarm — remain.

• Israel is finalizing a list of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners it will release in exchange for the 48 hostages remaining in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

• U.S. officials said 200 American troops would help coordinate the many aspects of the peace deal. There is no plan to send U.S. military into Gaza.

• Trump decided to pressure Israel for a deal after its attack on Qatar last month enraged him.

• Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, helped broker the pact from his South Florida mansion.

This is where each side stands:

Hamas is taking a risk. The group would give up much of its leverage over Israel by releasing the remaining hostages. There is no certainty that by doing so, it will achieve its main goals: the complete withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.

Netanyahu is thinking ahead. He had promised “total victory” in Gaza and is pulling back before Hamas has disarmed. But welcoming home Israeli hostages is a major political boost, and he will soon be up for re-election.

High energy

This summer, I got a good look at China’s clean-energy future, nearly 10,000 feet above sea level in Tibet. Solar panels stretch to the horizon and cover an area seven times the size of Manhattan. (They soak up sunlight that is much brighter than at sea level because the air is so thin.) Wind turbines dot nearby ridgelines, capturing night breezes. Hydropower dams sit where rivers spill down long chasms at the edges of the plateau. And high-voltage power lines carry this electricity to businesses and homes more than 1,000 miles away.

The intention is to harness the region’s bright sunshine, cold temperatures and sky-touching altitude to power the plateau and beyond, including data centers used in China’s artificial intelligence development.

While China still burns as much coal as the rest of the world combined, last month President Xi Jinping promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and expand renewable energy sixfold in coming years. A big part of that effort is in sparsely inhabited Qinghai, a province in western China in a region known among the Tibetans as Amdo. I came as part of a government-organized media tour of clean energy sites in Qinghai, which usually bars foreign journalists to hide dissent by its large ethnic Tibetan population. (The Times paid for my travel.) Today, I’ll tell you what I saw.

A huge effort

China is not the first country to experiment with high-altitude clean energy. But other places — in Switzerland and Chile, for instance — are mountainous and steep. Qinghai, slightly bigger than Texas, is mostly flat. That’s perfect for solar panels and the roads needed to bring them in. And the cold air improves the efficiency of solar panels. The ones here can could run every household in Chicago. And China is building more, including panels at 17,000 feet.

The main group of solar farms, known as the Talatan Solar Park, dwarfs every other cluster of solar farms in the world. It covers 162 square miles in Gonghe County, an alpine desert.

Electricity from solar and wind power in Qinghai (the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, now in exile) costs about 40 percent less than coal-fired power. As a result, several electricity-intensive industries are moving to the region. One type of plant turns quartzite from mines into polysilicon to make solar panels. And Qinghai plans to quintuple the number of data centers in the province. At this altitude, they consume 40 percent less electricity than centers at sea level, because they barely need air-conditioning here. (Air warmed by the servers is piped away to heat other buildings.)

As an incentive to build solar farms, many western Chinese provinces initially offered free land to companies. When the Talatan solar project installed its first panels in 2012, they were low to the ground. Ethnic Tibetan herders use the sparse vegetation here to graze their sheep, but the animals had trouble getting to the grass. Now installers place the panels on higher mountings.

Dislocating people for power projects is politically sensitive all over the world. But high-altitude projects affect relatively few people. China pushed more than one million people out of their homes in west-central China a quarter-century ago and flooded a vast area for the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam. This year, China has been installing enough solar panels every three weeks to match the power generation capacity of that dam.

See more photos here.

Li You contributed research from Gonghe County.

THE LATEST NEWS

Letitia James Indictment

• A prosecutor handpicked by President Trump secured an indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, after the president publicly demanded she be charged.

• The charges concern lying about a home on loan documents. James called the charges baseless.

• It’s the latest sign that the Justice Department is increasingly under the direct command of a president intent on using federal law enforcement to prosecute his adversaries.

• The prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, also indicted James Comey. Trump put her in the job weeks ago after her predecessor declined to charge either person.

• Trump has long targeted James: She ran on a platform of holding him accountable, accused him of inflating his wealth and has sued the administration to block its policies.

National Guard

Artificial intelligence capable of eliminating humanity is now a concrete possibility, Stephen Witt writes.

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N.F.L.: The Giants beat the Eagles, 34-17. People were searching for the game on Google.

College basketball: Sister Jean, the beloved chaplain of the Loyola Chicago men’s basketball team who rose to fame during the team’s surprising Final Four run in 2018, died yesterday at 106.

For an internet-obsessed generation, the streamer Kai Cenat’s bedroom is its version of Lorne Michaels’s Studio 8H or Oprah Winfrey’s beige couch. It is where Kevin Hart was doused with ice water while sleeping. It is where Cenat and Nicki Minaj held a mini dance party.

But Cenat’s 19 million Twitch followers also tune into his channel when there are no superstar guests. They watch him play video games. They watch him eat. They watch him sleep. In the early days, they would even watch his mother yell at him. “People want to see that relatable stuff because, at home, they are going through the same exact thing,” he told The Times. “You’re human, you need to show that.” Read more about him.

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• Late night praised Trump for the hostage deal.

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