Aurelia Butler

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    Despair Blankets Scene of Car-Ramming Attack at Festival

    Filipinos in Vancouver returned to a neighborhood to mourn the 11 people killed in a weekend attack.On any ordinary day, the South Vancouver neighborhood bustles with the sounds of life, but Saturday was no ordinary day. It was a celebration of Filipino culture, and music from a live concert echoed through the streets as families lined up at food trucks and children played.On Sunday it was strangely silent.“It gives me chills,” said Franchesca Gabo, taking it all in.Ms. Gabo, 20, left the festival shortly before a driver rammed his SUV into the mass of people, killing 11 and injuring more than 30.Now, she had come back, joining an impromptu vigil of people peering over police tape and trying in vain to absorb the enormity of what had happened.“It was a happy day yesterday,” Ms. Gabo said. “Everyone was celebrating.”The authorities say the motive for the attack did not appear to be terrorism. But beyond that little had emerged about the suspect in custody other than that he is a 30-year-old man with a history of mental illness. Now, he is charged with murder.More was becoming known about the victims at the festival celebrating Lapu Lapu Day.The youngest was Katie Le, a 5-year-old girl who was killed along with her parents, Richard Le, 47, and Linh Hoang, 30, according to local news reports. Mr. Le’s 16-year-old son, Andy, survived because of a last-minute decision to skip the festival in favor of homework, relatives said.A school board in a nearby suburb said that a guidance counselor named Kira Salim was also among the dead. “The loss of our friend and colleague has left us all shocked and heartbroken,” it said in a statement.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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    Harvard, Under Pressure, Revamps D.E.I. Office

    The move comes as President Trump has tried to abolish D.E.I. programs at universities.Harvard is revamping its diversity, equity and inclusion office in a move that seemed to accede to the Trump administration, even as the university has sued the administration and accused it of unlawfully interfering in the university’s affairs.An email to the Harvard community on Monday announced that the office had been renamed the Office of Community and Campus Life.The decision follows similar reorganizations across the country by universities, which appeared to be aimed at placating conservative critics who have attacked diversity offices as left-wing indoctrination factories.Harvard’s announcement stood out, though, because it came just hours after lawyers for the university and the Trump administration held their first conference in a lawsuit in which Harvard accuses the administration of invading freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.The Trump administration also opened another front in its fight with the university on Monday, accusing the Harvard Law Review, an independent student-run journal, of racial discrimination in journal membership and article selection. In a news release announcing that the law review was under investigation, Craig Trainor, the Department of Education’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said the journal “appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.” Responding to the announcement, Harvard Law School emphasized its commitment to ensuring that programs it oversees comply with the law, but pointed out that the journal is legally independent. A similar claim against the Harvard Law Review was dismissed in federal court in 2019. In announcing that Harvard’s diversity office was being revamped, Sherri Ann Charleston, formerly the chief diversity officer, said the university should bring people together based on their backgrounds and perspectives and “not the broad demographic groups to which they belong.”Dr. Charleston’s title has been changed to chief community and campus life officer.The Trump administration included abolishing D.E.I. efforts in a long list of demands it sent to Harvard two weeks ago, which the university would have to meet to continue receiving federal funding. Among other requirements, the administration ordered Harvard to appoint an external overseer to monitor students, faculty and staff for “viewpoint diversity,” to ban international students hostile to “American values,” and to eliminate activist faculty. The list of demands was sent by mistake, according to two people familiar with the matter, but the White House has continued to stand by the requirements. Harvard responded to the demands by filing the lawsuit in federal court. “No government, regardless of which party, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in a statement to the university.In retaliation, the administration has frozen more than $2.2 billion in university grants and contracts.Miles J. Herszenhorn More

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    How Trump’s Second Term Is Changing Power, Institutions and More

    <!–> [–><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>— Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman–><!–> –><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> [–>foreign policy Treaties, Alliances and Soft Power Are Out. Raw Power Is Back In. <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> […] More

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    Mexico to Give U.S. More Water From Their Shared Rivers

    A joint agreement appeared to avert a threat by President Trump of tariffs and sanctions in a long-running dispute over water rights in the border region.Mexico has agreed to send water to the United States and temporarily channel more water to the country from their shared rivers, a concession that appeared to defuse a diplomatic crisis sparked by yearslong shortages that left Mexico behind on its treaty-bound contribution of water from the borderlands.Earlier this month, President Trump threatened additional tariffs and other sanctions against Mexico over the water debt, amounting to about 420 billion gallons. In a social media post, Mr. Trump accused Mexico of “stealing” water from Texas farmers by not meeting its obligations under a 1944 treaty that mediates the distribution of water from three rivers the two countries share: the Rio Grande, the Colorado and the Tijuana. In an agreement announced jointly by Mexico and the United States on Monday, Mexico will immediately transfer some of its water reserves and will give the country a larger share of the flow of water from the Rio Grande through October.The concession from Mexico averted the threat of more punishing tariffs and diplomatic enmity with the United States amid the rollout of Mr. Trump’s new trade policies. But fulfilling the agreement is expected to significantly strain Mexico’s farmlands and could revive civil unrest triggered by previous water payments to the United States. Much of the Mexican borderlands are enduring extreme drought conditions, according to Mexico’s meteorological agency and water commission, and Mexico’s water reserves are at historic lows.Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has taken a conciliatory approach in negotiations with the Trump administration. Hours after Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs over the water dispute earlier this month, Ms. Sheinbaum acknowledged that her country had fallen short of its treaty commitments, citing the extreme drought and saying that Mexico had been complying “to the extent of water availability.”In a statement on Monday, the State Department lauded Ms. Sheinbaum “for her personal involvement” in negotiating the agreement, and spoke of “water scarcity affecting communities on both sides of the border.” A statement from the Mexican foreign ministry on the agreement noted that the United States had agreed not to seek a renegotiation of the 1944 water treaty.Longstanding tensions over water have simmered between Mexico and the United States. In 2020, those tensions exploded into violence in Mexico, as farmers rioted and seized control of a dam in the border region in an effort to shut off water deliveries to the United States.Rising temperatures and drought have made the water from rivers Mexico and the United States share all the more valuable.According to data provided by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which mediates water disputes between the two countries, Mexico has fallen well short of its treaty commitments on water delivery in the last five years. Between October 2020 and October 2024, Mexico provided just over 400,000 acre-feet of water, far less than the roughly 1.4 million acre-feet called for under treaty stipulations. The debt has only grown since.Emiliano Rodríguez Mega More

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    What to Know About the 3 U.S. Citizen Children Removed to Honduras

    Lawyers say the families wanted the children to remain in the United States. The Trump administration says the mothers requested the children’s removal. The dispute has constitutional stakes.The removal of three children with U.S. citizenship with their families to Honduras last week has prompted alarm that President Trump’s strict immigration enforcement may have crossed “illegal and unconstitutional” lines, as a federal judge in one of the cases put it.Lawyers for the two families involved said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. But Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said the mothers requested the children’s removal.The cases have added to growing concerns that the Trump administration may be violating the Constitution in its increasingly stringent crackdown on immigration, including removing U.S. citizens, a desire that Mr. Trump has expressed in the past but that legal experts say runs against longstanding prohibitions.Here is a look at the cases and what is at stake.What happened?Three children who are U.S. citizens were removed to Honduras last week as part of the deportation of other members of their families.Two of the children, ages 4 and 7, belong to one Honduran family. The mother of those children had an outstanding deportation order and had shown up to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in on Thursday, said Gracie Willis, the raids response coordinator with the National Immigration Project, who is helping the family’s immigration lawyer with the case.The 4-year-old, Ms. Willis said, has cancer. The mother had shown up to the check-in with a lawyer but was quickly thrust into the deportation process. Her lawyer had no meaningful chance to try to stop the deportation in court, Ms. Willis said.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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    Previously Unpublished: A Look at One of the Last Things Pope Francis Wrote

    In a foreword to a book, he articulated the church’s position on marriage.In the days since his death, Pope Francis has been called a reformer, outsider, influencer and modernizer. He was all of these things. But he was also the steward of the oldest institution in the Western world. He protected the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine — even if he did so in his own style.That is evident in one of Francis’ last writings, which was provided to The New York Times and has not previously been published. It’s a short foreword to a book, written for young Catholics, about the church’s teachings on love and marriage. The book is from the YOUCAT Foundation (short for youth catechism, or doctrine), an organization approved by the Vatican to publish the church’s teachings in a way that young people can understand. The foundation distributes books in 70 languages around the world.In the foreword, Francis articulates the church’s position on marriage: that it is a priority, one of sacred importance, and is only between a man and a woman. He breaks no new doctrinal ground. Still, the letter illustrates who Francis was as a pope: a pragmatic and compassionate communicator who skillfully repackaged, without necessarily changing, the church’s doctrine for a modern era. (Read the full text here.)“It’s a confirmation of a legacy,” Raúl Zegarra, a professor of Catholicism at Harvard, said. “It’s really a classic text by the pope.”His rhetorical styleIn his opening lines, Francis captures much of his approach to the papacy.“In my homeland of Argentina, there is a dance I love very much, one that I often participated in when I was young: the tango,” Francis, the first Latin American pope, writes. He then compares the tango, in all of its “discipline and dignity,” to marriage.“I am always touched to see young people who love each other and have the courage to transform their love into something great: ‘I want to love you until death do us part.’ What an extraordinary promise!”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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    Painting From Memory, Salman Toor Conjures Passion and Freedom

    Salman Toor needed a better perspective.Backing slowly away from his easel, the 42-year-old artist closed one eye and raised a thumb. He arched his back to gain a few more centimeters of distance and then snapped upright. Exasperation led to acceptance. He buried any doubts and raised a paintbrush, once again, to the emerald-green portrait of his mystery man in heart-shaped sunglasses.There is only one rule in the airy Brooklyn loft where Toor paints: Everything must come from memory.Fleeting impressions of a friend’s face, the arch of a lover’s eyebrows, and a smirk maybe sourced from a Velázquez drawing merge into the composite creatures that occupy his paintings.But there are no photographs, wooden models or reclining muses allowed in the studio, which is mostly empty except for a couch, some plants and a table used to hold brushes, pigments and oils.On a morning in March, the walls were covered with dozens of new drawings, paintings and etchings that Toor has created over the last few years in anticipation of his largest exhibition to date, “Wish Maker,” which opens May 2 across Luhring Augustine’s two galleries in Manhattan. The show aims to reintroduce the artist — who was born in Lahore, Pakistan — as one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience.This was Toor’s first chance at seeing everything in one room to decide which pictures he is comfortable exhibiting at a time when his work has become more politically conflicted and emotionally raw.“There is a lingering question,” the artist said. “What am I doing here in America?”Toor is one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience.Receiving his United States citizenship in 2019 and committing to life in New York felt like he was leaving his family behind to some degree. His parents remained supportive but distant; they have never seen one of his major shows in person because, he suggested, of the frank depictions of queer sexuality that run counter to their conservative community in Pakistan.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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    Pope Francis on Tango, and Lasting Marriage

    A transcript of one of the last things he wrote before he died.This is the full text of a foreword written by Pope Francis to a book outlining Catholic teachings on love and marriage for young people. It was translated from Italian by Isabella Corletto. Read more about the letter here.Dear friends,In my homeland of Argentina, there is a dance I love very much, one that I often participated in when I was young: the tango. Tango is a wonderful, free game between man and woman, filled with erotic charm and attraction. The male and female dancers court each other and experience closeness and distance, sensuality, attention, discipline and dignity. They rejoice in love and understand what it might mean to give themselves to someone completely. Perhaps it is due to my distant memory of this dance that I have called my great apostolic exhortation on marriage “Amoris Laetitia”: the joy of love.I am always touched to see young people who love each other and have the courage to transform their love into something great: “I want to love you until death do us part.” What an extraordinary promise! Of course, I am not blind, and neither are you. How many marriages today fail after three, five, seven years? Maybe your parents, too, began the sacrament of marriage with that same courage, but were unable to take their love to completion. Wouldn’t it be better, then, to avoid the pain, to touch each other only as though in a passing dance, to enjoy each other, play together, and then leave?Do not believe this! Believe in love, believe in God, and believe that you are capable of taking on the adventure of a love that lasts a lifetime. Love wants to be permanent; “until further notice” isn’t love. We humans have the desire to be accepted without reservations, and those who do not have this experience often — unknowingly — carry a wound for the rest of their lives. Instead, those who enter into a union lose nothing, but gain everything: life at its fullest.Holy Scripture is very clear: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). One flesh! Jesus takes this all to its culmination: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:8). One single body. One single home. One single life. One single family. One single love.In order to help you build a foundation for your relationship based on God’s faithful love, I have called upon the whole Church to do much more for you. We cannot continue on as before: many only see the beautiful ritual. And then, after some years, they separate. Faith is destroyed. Wounds are opened. There are often children who are missing a father or a mother. To me, this is like dancing tango poorly. Tango is a dance that must be learned. This is all the more true when it comes to marriage and family. Before receiving the sacrament of marriage, a proper preparation is necessary. A catechumenate, I would even venture to say, because all life takes place in love, and love is not something to take lightly.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