Aurelia Butler

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    A Special St. Patrick’s Day Guest: the Head of King George V

    At its show in Australia this weekend, the raucously political rap trio Kneecap brought what appeared to be the missing head of a King George V statue onstage.The irreverent, unrepentantly political Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap welcomed a special guest onto the stage of its show in Melbourne, Australia, over St. Patrick’s Day weekend: the head of King George V, which appeared to be a missing piece of a statue that was decapitated in the city last year.“Some madman dropped by with a huge King George’s head so he could hear a few tunes for our last Melbourne show!” the group posted on Instagram, alongside a photograph of the enormous bronze face onstage in front of one of the group members, Mo Chara.It was the latest twist in a monthslong mystery, after a towering statue of King George V in the King’s Domain area of Melbourne was decapitated and vandalized with paint last June, part of a wave of anticolonial vandalism that targeted imperial statues across the state of Victoria. The missing head seemed to briefly reappear in January, when a video posted on Instagram showed it on a barbecue grill, lit on fire. But it has been missing, again, ever since.“Allegedly his head was cut off last year in the city..…anyways he was put on stage for a few tunes and then whisked away,” the group wrote in its post. “Remember every colony can fall 🔥”.Kneecap — a trio composed of the West Belfast musicians Mo Chara, Moglai Bap and DJ Provai — has raucously burst into the mainstream over the past year with a critically acclaimed, truth-adjacent biopic. The group is known for its high-volume Republican politics and gleefully inebriated shows, in which its frontman, Bap, regularly appears shirtless and slugging from a bottle of Buckfast, the cheap tonic wine that is a universal Irish touchstone for a messy night out.Central to the group’s ethos are anti-colonialist politics and promotion of the Indigenous language. Bap, Chara and DJ Provai perform in both Irish and English, and they have spoken often about the importance of promoting and preserving the Irish language, which was banned across the island during British occupation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How A.I. Is Changing the Way the World Builds Computers

    This is the most fundamental change to computing since the early days of the World Wide Web. Just as companies completely rebuilt their computer systems to accommodate the new commercial internet in the 1990s, they are now rebuilding from the bottom up — from tiny components to the way that computers are housed and powered […] More

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    Venezuelan Families Fear for Relatives as Trump Celebrates Deportations to El Salvador

    Mirelis Casique last spoke to her 24-year-old son on Saturday morning while he was being held in a detention center in Laredo, Texas. He told her he was going to be deported with a group of Venezuelans, she said, but he didn’t know where they were headed.Shortly after, his name disappeared from the website of U.S. immigration authorities. She has not heard from him since.“Now he’s in an abyss with no one to rescue him,” Ms. Casique said on Sunday in an interview from her home in Venezuela.The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend has created panic among families who fear that their relatives are among those handed over by the Trump administration to Salvadoran authorities, apparently without due process.The men were described by a spokeswoman for the White House, Karoline Leavitt, as “terrorists” belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and “heinous monsters” who, she said, had recently been arrested, “saving countless American lives.” But several relatives of men believed to be in the group say their loved ones do not have gang ties.On Sunday, the Salvadoran government released images of the men being marched into a notorious mega-prison in handcuffs overnight, with their heads newly shaven.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: A Poetic Act

    It was a big week for cutting loose and confessions, for sex as a metaphor but also just for sex.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Full-Moon Party’The HBO publicity department is pretty good at keeping secrets, huh? Last week, the season premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones” featured an unexpected guest star: the 12-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper. This week, “The White Lotus” brings in the Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell, whose participation in this season had been kept pretty tightly under wraps, right up to the moment he appeared onscreen as Frank, Rick’s old friend in Bangkok.Rockwell is not this episode’s main character. But he does deliver a knockout monologue that is one of the season’s standout scenes. And his speech would likely be the most talked about “White Lotus” moment this wee, were it not for the rather shocking kiss at the end of the episode.I will get to the smooching, I promise. But I want to start with Frank, who meets Rick at a nice hotel, bringing with him something Rick needs for when he confronts his father: a heavy bag containing a big gun. We are not told how these two men know each other or why one of them is holding on to an arsenal. But clearly they have a close friendship, which has apparently involved some violent exploits.This episode is a direct continuation of last week’s, which had several characters heading out to various decadent parties, joining the locals in celebrating the full moon. The “White Lotus” creator and director Mike White does a lot more intercutting between the story lines than usual, creating a feeling that night itself has its own dark, strange momentum as people across Thailand get increasingly intoxicated.But the episode breaks from that delirium for one long speech from Frank, who has to explain to his old friend why he has embraced Buddhism and given up booze, drugs and sex.Frank’s story is too raunchy to repeat in fine detail. It involves him interrogating the nature of desire and the role gender identity plays in lust — all of which led to him experimenting with cross-dressing and gay orgies before coming to the conclusion that “sex is a poetic act; it’s a metaphor.” But for what? That remained frustratingly unclear to Frank, which is why he become a Buddhist, detaching himself from the wheel of lust and suffering.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Slick Watts, N.B.A. Fan Favorite and Headband Pioneer, Dies at 73

    An undrafted, 6-foot-1 point guard with patchy hair, he made an enduring fashion statement and became seen as the ultimate Seattle SuperSonic.Slick Watts, an unheralded, undersized, patchy-haired point guard who turned his obstacles into springboards, endearing himself to fans of the Seattle SuperSonics long past the team’s existence and helping to invent the headband as a basketball fashion signature, has died. He was 73.His son Donald announced the death on social media on Saturday in a statement that did not provide further details. In 2021, Watts had a major stroke, and he spent recent years dealing with lung sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition.Watts played for the SuperSonics for just four and a half seasons, from 1973-78. Though he helped lead the team to its first playoff berth, he was not around in 1979 for the team’s first and only finals victory.Still, fans and fellow players held him in a singular regard.In 2012, decades after his retirement — and four years after the team moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder — a Seattle rap duo called the Blue Scholars made Watts’s name the title of a song about the Sonics. James Donaldson, a Sonics center in the 1980s, told The Seattle Times after Watts’s death, “He epitomized the Seattle SuperSonics.”That reputation came from a combination of pluck and generosity.Watts’s basketball origins were modest. He was an impressive collegiate shooter, averaging 22.8 points per game and shooting 49 percent from the field. But he was just 6-foot-1 and played for Xavier University of Louisiana, alittle-known historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans (not Xavier University of Cincinnati). He went undrafted in 1973.That might have been the end of his basketball career, except for the fact that Watts’s college coach, Bob Hopkins, was a cousin of Bill Russell, the Celtics great then coaching the Sonics. He secured Watts a professional tryout. The team was already loaded with shooting talent, so Watts devoted himself to passing. Russell offered him a $19,000-a-year contract, paltry by N.B.A. standards.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Scenes From Eight States Battered by Weekend Storms

    A cross-country storm system tore through the South and the Midwest over the weekend, accompanied by tornadoes, dust storms and wildfires. Severe damage was reported in at least eight states.Number of reported deaths from storms and firesOfficials reported at least 40 deaths across seven states that have been attributed to severe weather in the South and Midwest. More

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    With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch

    The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where they would be held for at least a year.“Oopsie … Too late,” Mr. Bukele wrote in a social media post on Sunday morning that was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung.Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in another social media post, thanked Mr. Bukele for a lengthy post detailing the migrants’ incarceration.“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.”Some details of the government’s actions remained unclear, including the exact time the planes landed. In a Sunday afternoon filing, the Trump administration said the State Department and Homeland Security Department were “promptly notified” of the judge’s written order when it was posted to the electronic docket at 7:26 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. The filing implied that the government had a different legal authority for deporting the Venezuelans besides the one blocked by the judge, which could provide a basis for them to remain in El Salvador while the order is appealed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Map: 5.5-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Ethiopia

    Shake intensity Note: Map shows the area with a shake intensity of 4 or greater, which U.S.G.S. defines as “light,” though the earthquake may be felt outside the areas shown. Source: U.S.G.S. By William B. Davis and John Keefe More