Miller Gardner, the 14-year-old son of the longtime Yankees player Brett Gardner, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while on vacation with his family last month, the Costa Rican authorities said on Thursday.

A toxicology report after his death found high levels of carboxyhemoglobin, an indicator of carbon monoxide in the blood, according to a statement from Randall Zúñiga, the director of the Costa Rica Judicial Investigation Agency. Miller Gardner’s test showed a saturation of 64 percent, he said, adding that anything over 50 percent was lethal.

Mr. Zúñiga said that other tests were also performed, including drug tests, but they were all negative. He said the autopsy report found telltale signs of carbon monoxide poisoning on the organs, and added that the case could be considered closed.

Miller and his family were staying at a resort in Costa Rica. The family said in a statement released through the Yankees last month that Miller had died on March 21 “after falling ill along with several other family members while on vacation.”

“He passed away peacefully in his sleep,” the family said.

The authorities said the family was staying in Manuel Antonio, a resort area on the central Pacific Coast of Costa Rica.

The authorities said at a news conference on Wednesday that the family’s room at the resort was next to a room with machinery and said that contamination may have occurred as a result.

The resort where the family stayed, Arenas Del Mar Beachfront & Rainforest Resort, did not respond to a request for comment after the toxicology results.

The family said Miller “loved football, baseball, golf, hunting, fishing, his family and his friends.”

Brett Gardner, 41, played for the Yankees for his entire major league career from 2008 to 2021.

He played left and center field and was part of the Yankee World Series championship team of 2009. By 2019 he was the last remaining Yankee from that team, which was the last to win the title.

A speedy left-handed hitting player, he led the league in stolen bases in 2011 and triples in 2013. His lone All Star season came in 2015. For his career, he hit .256 with 139 home runs.

He scored the final run in the old Yankee Stadium in 2008.

Mr. Gardner and his wife, Jessica, reside in South Carolina. They have another son, Hunter, who is 16.

Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.

What is the I.C.C.?

The I.C.C., established under a 1998 treaty, is the world’s highest criminal court.

It has the jurisdiction to investigate and try people for what it describes as “the gravest crimes of concern” to the world: war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. But the court cannot enforce its rulings and relies on its member states to detain people who are accused of crimes.

The court draws its jurisdiction from the Rome Statute, a treaty ratified by 125 countries. The statute formally commits its signatories to arrest a wanted person who enters their soil, but members do not always comply.

The court is based in The Hague, a Dutch city that is a hub for international law and justice. The International Court of Justice, which handles civil disputes between countries and is part of the United Nations, is also based there.

The I.C.C. cannot try any suspects in absentia. Instead, it relies on member states to enforce its rulings with actions like making arrests, freezing assets and surrendering suspects to The Hague, where the I.C.C. has a detention center.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is currently in I.C.C. custody after being arrested in March by Filipino authorities on charges of crimes against humanity.

Which countries are not members of the court?

Some of the world’s most powerful countries, including the United States, China, Russia, India and Israel, are not members of the court. They do not honor its arrest warrants or hand their citizens over for prosecution.

Hungary would be the first European Union country to withdraw from the court. Under the Rome Statute, Hungary’s decision would not take effect for a year.

“Hungary remains under a duty to cooperate with the I.C.C.,” Fadi El Abdallah, the court spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday.

Burundi and the Philippines have both pulled out of court, in response to the I.C.C. prosecutor opening an investigation against their leaders. The court has said that Mr. Duterte is being prosecuted because the offenses he is accused of took place before his country’s withdrawal took effect, although his lawyers have contested that argument.

Who has the I.C.C. pursued?

The court says that it has issued 60 arrest warrants.

About half of those people are “at large,” like Mr. Netanyahu. Others are either dead, like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former leader of Libya, or detained, like Mr. Duterte.

Israel and Gaza

In November, the court issued arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel and Hamas. On the Israeli side, the warrants were for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

The court also issued a warrant for Muhammad Deif, a Hamas leader, who was later killed in an Israeli strike.

Russia

The court issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir V. Putin and another Russian official in 2023. It argued that they both bore criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It has also issued arrest warrants for four other Russian officials.

Mr. Putin made his first visit to an I.C.C. member state in September, but the country, Mongolia, warmly welcomed him with a red carpet.

Kenya

William Ruto, the president, was charged in 2011 with crimes against humanity and other offenses tied to post-election violence in 2007 and 2008. The court dropped the case in 2016.

Sudan

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was deposed as president in 2019 after three decades in power, is the subject of court warrants in 2009 and 2010 for crimes in the western region of Darfur. He traveled to South Africa in 2015 in defiance of the I.C.C. warrant but was not arrested there.

The I.C.C. also charged other Sudanese officials with crimes in Darfur.

Mr. al-Bashir also faces charges in Sudan that relate to the coup in 1989 that pushed him to power. If convicted, he could receive the death sentence or life in prison on those charges.

Israel’s leaders have articulated various goals for the expanding war in Gaza, spreading confusion over how the objectives might be achieved and on what terms the renewed campaign might end.

The primary aim is to squeeze Hamas into releasing the dozens of remaining hostages in Gaza. But other goals have emerged.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had “moved up a gear” in Gaza, capturing more territory, hitting militants and carving up the enclave. He reiterated his ultimate goals of crushing Hamas’s military capabilities and terminating its rule over Gaza, neither of which have been achieved in more than a year of war.

The defense minister, Israel Katz, said a day earlier that the military was seizing more territory to protect its forces and border towns, suggesting the possibility of a longer-term presence.

And over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would enable what he described as the voluntary emigration of Gazans, without clarifying where they would go.

If all of these different objectives have created uncertainty about what is to come, that may be intentional.

The military chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said on Wednesday that Israel would “preserve operational ambiguity and the element of surprise” during a field visit to Gaza. “The only thing that can halt our advance is the release of our hostages!”

Israeli forces appear to be gradually dissecting the enclave into separate districts, in part to encircle and restrict the movement of Hamas fighters who have regrouped in different areas, according to analysts.

But as the military attacks areas of Gaza that it had already conquered multiple times before, as well as some new ones, questions remain about what the forces can do this time that they couldn’t do in more than 15 months of fighting.

“The government has not yet presented a viable diplomatic framework that will translate the military achievements into realizing the war objectives over time and justify the prices paid for them,” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Israel’s ambiguity about its endgame in Gaza could also serve to satisfy the far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition and buttress his grip on power by leaving open an option of fully occupying the enclave and, eventually, building new Jewish settlements there.

It is also unclear how the campaign will help the remaining hostages who were taken in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war. Hamas is insisting on negotiations as the only way to free them, demanding a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.

Israel has conditioned any end of the war on the disarmament of Hamas and its leaders leaving Gaza, terms the group has refused.

Former hostages have testified that their conditions in captivity only worsened as Israeli military pressure increased and that they feared being killed at any moment by their captors or Israeli bombardment.

To a large extent, Mr. Orion said of Israel’s renewed offensive, “it is a development that endangers the lives of the remaining hostages.” On Wednesday, a group representing the families of hostages said they were “horrified” to wake up to Mr. Katz’s announcement about the expansion of military operations in Gaza.

Israel broke a two-month cease-fire with Hamas on March 18 after talks to extend the truce stalled.

In the weeks since, Israeli troops have retaken most of the Netzarim Corridor, a route dividing the northern and southern halves of Gaza. On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli forces were seizing another east-west corridor in southern Gaza.

The military has recently thickened parts of a buffer zone inside Gaza’s perimeter, and it has expanded ground raids in the northern and southern ends of the enclave along with issuing sweeping evacuation orders.

On Thursday, the military issued more evacuation warnings for residents of neighborhoods in eastern Gaza City ahead of operations there.

That has led to the displacement of more than 140,000 people in Gaza since the cease-fire broke down, according to the United Nations.

More than 1,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the cease-fire collapsed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The ministry said Thursday that the bodies of 97 people who had died had arrived at hospitals in Gaza in the previous day.

The ministry also said that the bodies of 27 people that is said had been killed in an Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in Gaza City had arrived at a hospital. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its casualty counts and the circumstances were not clear.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports and could not immediately comment. It has in the past accused Hamas of embedding itself among the civilian population.

In another tactic aimed at pressuring Hamas, Israel halted the entry of all commercial goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza a month ago, leading to price gouging by local merchants and shortages. The World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said this week it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep bakeries in Gaza open.

Gaza health officials say that more than 50,000 people have been killed in the enclave in the war prompted by the Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and in which 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages.

Israel believes up to 24 living hostages are being held in Gaza along with the remains of about 35 others.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.

A Kremlin envoy met in the White House on Wednesday with President Trump’s senior aide on Russia negotiations, Steve Witkoff, according to a person in Washington with knowledge of the talks. The Russian envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, said online on Thursday that he had been in Washington to meet with Trump administration officials.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit is the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.

Mr. Dmitriev is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation. His counterpart, Mr. Witkoff, a real estate businessman who is also Mr. Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, traveled late last month to Moscow, where he met with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Dmitriev arrived in Washington with two aides on Tuesday, and he and Mr. Witkoff met in the White House on Wednesday afternoon, said the person in Washington familiar with the events. The two officials continued talking in the evening.

The talks appeared to be the latest step in Russia’s effort to improve ties with the United States after Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” at Mr. Putin for remarks that the Russian president had made on Ukraine, where Russia has been waging a full-scale war since 2022.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” The meeting also took place as Mr. Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.

The Treasury Department suspended sanctions on Mr. Dmitriev for seven days to allow him to visit, and the State Department then granted him a travel waiver and a visa, said the person in Washington. Mr. Dmitriev was still in Washington on Thursday.

Mr. Dmitriev said on Telegram on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.

The White House National Security Council referred questions to the State Department on Thursday morning, and the State Department then referred questions to the White House.

Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.

In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.

In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”

“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, after Mr. Putin rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.

But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.

In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.

U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.

“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.

The sweeping tariffs that President Trump announced on Wednesday could hobble the use of giant batteries that energy companies are increasingly installing to help them tap more wind and solar power and make the broader electric grid more reliable.

Over the past five years, grid batteries have become one of the biggest growth industries in the U.S. energy sector. In states like Texas and Arizona, companies have been installing stacks of lithium-ion cells the size of shipping containers. They can soak up excess wind and solar energy and save it for when it’s needed. In California, the use of batteries to store solar power for the evening hours has helped utilities reduce the amount of natural gas that is burned.

Yet the majority of America’s lithium-ion batteries are still imported, and 69 percent of those imports came from China in 2024, according to BloombergNEF. Mr. Trump’s latest round of tariffs, when combined with earlier trade moves, will impose a 64.5 percent tax on grid batteries from China, and that rate would rise to 82 percent next year.

“This will throttle U.S. energy storage deployment,” Jason Burwen, vice president of policy and strategy at the battery developer GridStor, wrote in a social media post. “Bad for business, bad for grid reliability.”

Energy companies were expected to install a record 18,200 megawatts of grid battery capacity this year, enough to store the entire output from 18 large nuclear reactors for a few hours, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Together, batteries, wind and solar power were expected to make up 93 percent of capacity added to the grid.

Those batteries help address renewable energy’s biggest weakness: the fact that the wind and sun aren’t always available. In states that rely heavily on solar power like California and Texas, a boom in battery installations has helped reduce the risk of blackouts during the hot summer months by working together with gas plants to provide power when demand spikes.

But batteries aren’t just useful for adding more renewables: Utilities also use them to smooth out small disruptions in the flow of electricity, say, if a power plant unexpectedly tripped offline. Or, they can be used to reduce congestion on transmission lines.

Companies have largely been installing grid batteries because the price of lithium-ion technology has plummeted (the batteries are similar to those found in electric cars). Tariffs could reverse that trend.

“Batteries are the only major clean tech sector where imports still overwhelmingly come from China,” said Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains at BloombergNEF. “So the impacts of these tariffs are going to be a lot bigger for batteries than they are for other technologies.”

In recent years, the United States has started to build up a domestic battery supply chain. After the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed, the Biden administration poured billions of dollars into new battery factories and offered tax credits for both domestic manufacturers and the use of batteries in both grids and electric vehicles.

But many of those factories face an uncertain future now that President Trump and Republicans in Congress are looking to roll back a variety of clean energy policies.

Teasing out the precise effects of tariffs on the energy mix is complicated, Mr. Vagneur-Jones said. Right now, batteries often compete with natural gas plants as a technology to fill in the gaps left by fluctuating wind and solar power.

But it won’t always be so easy for many power companies to increase their use of gas: There is a lengthy global backlog for new gas turbines, and a company trying to build a new gas plant from scratch today may have to wait until 2030 or beyond. The oil and gas industry is also being hurt by new tariffs on steel and aluminum, which can affect everything from the steel pipe used to line new gas wells to power transformers.

“It’s always tempting to say these tariffs are good for fossil fuels, bad for clean energy,” said Mr. Vagneur-Jones. “But I think it’s just bad for everyone.”

They call themselves emissaries of the world’s first “sovereign nation” for Hindus, with its own passports and “cosmic constitution.” They claim to have created an official currency in sacred gold, managed by a “reserve bank.”

Representatives of this nonexistent country have given statements at U.N. events and posed for photos with global statesmen, American congressmen and the mayor of Newark. Their leader, a fugitive holy man, professes to be able to guide the process of reincarnation, guaranteeing that billionaires who use his services won’t be paupers in the next life.

But the self-proclaimed United States of Kailasa has now collided with reality.

Last week, officials in Bolivia said they had arrested 20 people associated with Kailasa, accusing them of “land trafficking” after they negotiated 1,000-year leases with Indigenous groups for swathes of the Amazon.

The agreements were declared void, and the Kailasans were deported — not to Kailasa, but to their actual home countries, among them India, the United States, Sweden and China.

“Bolivia does not maintain diplomatic relations with the alleged nation ‘United States of Kailasa,’” Bolivia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Kailasa’s “press office of the Holy See of Hinduism” did not respond to requests for comment.

The bizarre story of Kailasa stretches back at least to 2019, when the guru known as Swami Nithyananda — a.k.a. His Divine Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism — fled India after being accused of rape, torture and child abuse.

Born Arunachalam Rajasekaran in southern India, he became a Hindu monk and started his first ashram in his 20s near the tech hub of Bengaluru. He quickly built an empire across India and in cities around the world.

Nithyananda was also grandiose, linking himself to long religious and royal lineages. He claimed miracle powers, like helping the blind see through a “third eye” or delaying the sunrise by 40 minutes.

“I am a totality of unknown in your life. I’m the manifest of un-manifest,” he said in one sermon. “The moment you sit in front of me, enlightenment starts.”

During a conversation in front of a large crowd, he endorsed the idea of “the world’s first inter-life reincarnation trust management.” Rich people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could invest a few billion dollars in a trust; Nithyananda said he possessed the knowledge system to ensure they got the money when they were reborn.

That would be important, Nithyananda’s interlocutor said, “because it is possible Bill Gates will be born very poor, Warren Buffett may be born in some African village as a very poor guy.”

When the accusations of rape and sexual assault started piling up and the government went after Nithyananda, he claimed that the cases were an anti-Hindu conspiracy “to grab my land.”

It is not clear where he went after fleeing India, but reports put him in South America or the Caribbean. A couple of years later, he resurfaced with the declaration that he had founded the United States of Kailasa, which he said was the revival of past Hindu kingdoms.

The new nation’s website — where “free e-citizenship” is just a few clicks away — said its sovereign lands were “in the Andean region.” Nithyananda, who is now in his late 40s, was up front about the benefits the location offered.

“Many people asked me, ‘Swami ji, why did you leave such a huge empire you built in India and are sitting in a corner?’” he says in a video, referring to himself using an Indian honorific. The answer, he said, was “immunity” that made him “non-prosecutable” as the head of his own state.

Since then, Kailasa had popped up now and again when its emissaries caused embarrassment for politicians around the world.

In 2023, a senior official in Paraguay resigned after he had signed a memorandum of understanding with Kailasa. Earlier that year, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, rescinded a sister cities agreement with the fictitious nation days after holding a ceremony announcing the partnership.

In Bolivia, the Kailasa followers, who officials said had arrived on tourist visas, managed a photo with the country’s president, Luis Arce. There is no evidence that Nithyananda joined them there.

Scandal erupted after an investigation by the Bolivian newspaper El Deber revealed the leases that the Kailasans had signed with Indigenous groups in the Amazon.

Pedro Guasico, a leader of the Baure, one of the groups, said its contact with the Kailasa emissaries had begun late last year, when they arrived offering help after forest fires.

The conversations eventually turned to a lease of land three times the size of New Delhi, and the Baure agreed to a 25-year deal that would supposedly have paid them nearly $200,000 annually. But when the Kailasa representatives came back with a draft in English, it covered 1,000 years and included the use of air space and the extraction of natural resources.

Mr. Guasico said his group signed anyway. “We made the mistake of listening to them,” he said by phone. “They offered us that money as an annual bonus for conserving and protecting our territory, but it was completely false.”