And Francis, the first Jesuit pope, spoke often about art, music, literature and cinema — both as instruments of evangelization and guardians of human dignity. Art, for him, was a “vital reality,” one he contrasted with the “throwaway culture” of the global market. More
State Senator Jason Pizzo, the Democratic minority leader, announced in a floor speech that he was leaving the party.The highest-ranking Democrat in the Florida Senate announced in dramatic fashion on Thursday that he was leaving the party, the latest setback for Democrats whose influence in the state has rapidly diminished.State Senator Jason W.B. Pizzo, whose district includes parts of Miami-Dade and Broward Counties in South Florida, said in a speech on the Senate floor that he was changing his voter registration to “no party affiliation,” the most common registration in Florida for independent voters.“The Democratic Party in Florida is dead,” Mr. Pizzo told his fellow lawmakers. “There are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me. That’s not convenient. That’s not cool.”Mr. Pizzo had signaled that he might run for governor next year. He had been visible in many high-profile debates, using his background as a former prosecutor to grill Republicans. But he was also sometimes at odds with fellow Democrats on matters of law and order. Earlier this week, he said critics had accused him of being a racist for calling for an audit of a South Florida municipality with a largely Black population.“I follow the law,” Mr. Pizzo said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “If anybody’s feelings are hurt and think I’m a racist for my position — suck it.”Mr. Pizzo did not immediately respond to interview requests on Thursday.In a statement after Mr. Pizzo announced he was leaving the party, Nikki Fried, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, called Mr. Pizzo “one of the most ineffective and unpopular Democratic leaders in recent memory” and said his resignation was “one of the best things to happen to the party in years.”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
A declaration by an ICE official says an English-language form was “read and explained” to the detainees and that they had “no less than 12 hours” to express the intent to challenge their deportations. On April 7, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must give Venezuelan migrants notice “within a reasonable time” and the chance to legally challenge their removal before being deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Exactly how much notice the Trump administration considered appropriate in response to the Supreme Court’s edict was revealed in a document unsealed during a hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas.Before Saturday, when the Supreme Court issued a second order, which blocked the deportation of a group of Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, detainees slated for deportation were given a one-page form that stated “if you desire to make a phone call, you will be permitted to do so,” according to the unsealed document, a four-page declaration by an official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They then had “no less than 12 hours” to “express an intent” to challenge their detention, and another 24 hours to file a habeas corpus petition asking for a hearing before a judge, the declaration said. The form itself is written in English, but “it is read and explained to each alien in a language that alien understands.” The hearing was part of a case whose plaintiffs are three Venezuelan men being held at El Valle Detention Facility, roughly 50 miles from Brownsville.Lawyers for detainees held elsewhere, who have sued in the Northern District of Texas, have disputed the government’s claims about being given notice. They also have said that the form was not explained to detainees and that they were simply told to sign the document, which the ICE declaration identified as Form AEA-21B.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
An explosion near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital on Sunday killed 12 people, according to health authorities tied to the Houthi-led government.A deadly blast on Sunday near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital was caused by a Houthi missile, not a U.S. airstrike, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said on Thursday.The health ministry of the Houthi-led government said earlier this week that an American airstrike had hit a densely populated neighborhood of Sana, the Yemeni capital, killing 12 people and injuring 30 others. The blast struck an area adjacent to Sana’s Old City, a UNESCO world heritage site filled with ancient towers.Dave Eastburn, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that while the damage and casualties described by local health officials most “likely did occur,” they were not the result of an American attack. While the United States had conducted military operations over Sana that night, the closest American strike was more than three miles away, he added.The Pentagon’s assessment that the damage was caused by a “Houthi Air Defense missile” was based in part on a review of “local reporting, including videos documenting Arabic writing on the missile’s fragments at the market,” Mr. Eastburn said. The Pentagon did not provide those videos or evidence of its claims in its statements.An initial review by The New York Times of local reporting and open-source material in Yemen found a video showing a missile fragment with Arabic writing posted to social media, however it was from a different location from the market in Sana’s Old City. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ Politburo, said in a phone interview that the American denial was an attempt to smear the Houthis. He reiterated that the group believed that the United States targeted the neighborhood on Sunday, “just as it previously targeted ports, cemeteries and citizens’ homes, resulting in the deaths of hundreds.”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
Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, criticized a vice chair of the party, David Hogg, over his controversial plan to challenge Democratic incumbents.A brewing weeklong fight inside the Democratic National Committee burst into the open on Thursday as the party’s chairman, Ken Martin, rebuked one of his vice chairs and moved to stop him from intervening in Democratic primary races while serving as a top party official.The vice chair, David Hogg, 25, had announced last week that he planned to spend money in Democratic primaries through his outside group, Leaders We Deserve, and that he hoped to raise $20 million for the effort.That set off a storm of criticism from Democrats angry at the idea that a top party official would be putting his finger on the scale in primary contests. On Thursday, Mr. Martin responded publicly for the first time, declaring, “No D.N.C. officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary.”Mr. Martin said he had “great respect” for Mr. Hogg and understood his goals, yet he issued what amounted to an ultimatum: Mr. Hogg was “more than free” to fund primary challenges, just not as an officer of the D.N.C.Mr. Martin made his comments on a call with reporters announcing plans to expand grants to the party’s operations in red states.At a private meeting last month, all of the committee’s officers — except Mr. Hogg — signed a pledge promising to remain neutral in primary races.Mr. Hogg has done a blitz in the news media, appearing on cable shows to make his case after The New York Times first reported his plans, which he stipulated would be limited to races for safe Democratic seats. Mr. Hogg said his goal was to elect a younger generation of Democrats and replace older incumbents he saw as less effective. Still, as he faced blowback on Capitol Hill, his group donated $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said Mr. Martin would introduce a series of previously planned party changes that would include putting neutrality in the bylaws — meaning Mr. Hogg could not serve in his position if he were still pursuing his plan.The package will go before the party’s membership in August, she said.Ms. Kleeb said the importance of party neutrality was made clear during the divisive 2016 primary race between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, when party leaders supported Mrs. Clinton.“David got elected to be a D.N.C. officer,” Ms. Kleeb said of Mr. Hogg’s vice-chair post. “He did not get elected to primary Democrats.”Ms. Kleeb said she had spoken with Mr. Hogg privately and told him that he could remain a part of D.N.C. leadership if he walled himself off from his outside group’s endorsement decisions, as some union leaders have done.”He can’t have both,” she said. “He has to make a decision.”Mr. Hogg did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More
As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.One of my most deeply held values as a tech columnist is humanism. I believe in humans, and I think that technology should help people, rather than disempower or replace them. I care about aligning artificial intelligence — that is, making sure that A.I. systems act in accordance with human values — because I think our values are fundamentally good, or at least better than the values a robot could come up with.So when I heard that researchers at Anthropic, the A.I. company that made the Claude chatbot, were starting to study “model welfare” — the idea that A.I. models might soon become conscious and deserve some kind of moral status — the humanist in me thought: Who cares about the chatbots? Aren’t we supposed to be worried about A.I. mistreating us, not us mistreating it?It’s hard to argue that today’s A.I. systems are conscious. Sure, large language models have been trained to talk like humans, and some of them are extremely impressive. But can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights? Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close.But I was intrigued. After all, more people are beginning to treat A.I. systems as if they are conscious — falling in love with them, using them as therapists and soliciting their advice. The smartest A.I. systems are surpassing humans in some domains. Is there any threshold at which an A.I. would start to deserve, if not human-level rights, at least the same moral consideration we give to animals?Consciousness has long been a taboo subject within the world of serious A.I. research, where people are wary of anthropomorphizing A.I. systems for fear of seeming like cranks. (Everyone remembers what happened to Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee who was fired in 2022, after claiming that the company’s LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.)But that may be starting to change. There is a small body of academic research on A.I. model welfare, and a modest but growing number of experts in fields like philosophy and neuroscience are taking the prospect of A.I. consciousness more seriously, as A.I. systems grow more intelligent. Recently, the tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel compared A.I. welfare to animal welfare, saying he believed it was important to make sure “the digital equivalent of factory farming” doesn’t happen to future A.I. beings.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
Plus: an architectural travel guide, dishes that pay homage to Henri Matisse and more recommendations.Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Stay HereIn Paris, a Hotel That Mixes Past and PresentLeft: La Fondation’s fine-dining restaurant on the eighth floor of the hotel. Right: the bedrooms are clad in oak paneling with blue feature walls inspired by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s influence on fashion.Paris’s 17th Arrondissement, near the city’s northwestern limits, is mostly residential, so it’s not typically front of mind for visitors to the French capital. But the opening of La Fondation, a 58-room hotel with interiors by the New York-based design firm Roman and Williams, might shift that mind-set. It’s part of a new 10-story complex that also includes an office space with rooftop gardens, a gym — which features a rock-climbing wall, 80-foot-long pool and multiple fitness rooms — and a spa with saunas, a hammam and treatment rooms. Hotel guests get access to all of this, along with two French restaurants — a classic bistro and a fine-dining option, both helmed by the local chef Thomas Rossi — and a rooftop bar that offers sweeping views spanning from the Sacre Coeur to the Eiffel Tower. For the hotel décor, Roman and Williams referenced the city’s late Modernist period: rooms feature color-blocked walls bordered by oak frames — a nod to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dress. In the common areas, large-scale commissions such as a wooden wall sculpture by the Croatian artisan Vedran Jakšić or the painted ceramic tiles by French artist Pierre Yves Canard, merge with the architecture. “There’s a constant interplay between refinement and rawness, fashion and function, Paris then and now,” says Robin Standefer, a co-founder of Roman and Williams. La Fondation opens April 28; from $440 a night, en.lafondationhotel.com.Read ThisA Pocket-Size Guide to Modernist Buildings Around the World“Modernist Travel Guide,” Adam Štěch’s new book published by Sight Unseen, spotlights an international trove of buildings, including the architect Otto Kolb’s villa in Zurich.Adam ŠtěchThe Prague-based design historian and photographer Adam Štěch had an early fascination with marine biology. “My role model was [the French oceanographer] Jacques Cousteau,” he says. “I wanted to be an explorer.” Štěch, who later developed a keen interest in architecture, has visited nearly 50 countries, documenting notable 20th-century buildings and forgotten ones too. As a result, he often fields inquiries from friends bound for Honolulu or Paris or Mexico City. “What should I see?” goes the familiar refrain. “Tell me some hidden Modernist gems.” Now — thanks to the online magazine and first-time book publisher Sight Unseen, with support from the Swiss company USM Modular Furniture — these answers arrive in pocket-size book form. “Modernist Travel Guide” is a tour of 30 international cities, each with a dozen or so highlights. Some, like the psychedelic Pannenhuis Metro Station in Brussels or Arne Jacobsen’s canopied gas station outside Copenhagen, are open to the public. Others, like the Berlin example of Le Corbusier’s colorful Unité d’Habitation buildings, can only be admired from the street. The book’s breadth — a Madrid optics institute, a Los Angeles deli, a little-known London storefront designed by the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius — prompts an offbeat scavenger hunt, wherever you might wind up. “Modernist Travel Guide” will be available May 8; $38, shop.sightunseen.com.See ThisIn New York’s Chelsea, an Exhibition and a Restaurant Dedicated to the Painter Teruko YokoiLeft: Teruko Yokoi in her studio at Hotel Chelsea in 1959. Right: Yokoi’s “Autumn Day” (1983).Left: Charles Gimpel, courtesy of the Estate of Teruko Yokoi. Right: © Estate of Teruko Yokoi; courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New YorkThe Japanese Swiss artist Teruko Yokoi lived and worked in New York’s Hotel Chelsea for three productive years until she moved out in 1961. She never returned, says her daughter, Kayo, who has managed her estate since her death in 2020. But next month, the abstract painter and collage artist will have a homecoming of sorts with the opening of a Japanese restaurant named after her and an exhibition at the nearby Hollis Taggart gallery. The restaurant, in the hotel’s cellar, will serve simple Japanese dishes (plated on the chef Tadashi Ono’s own ceramics) across a 12-seat sushi bar and dining room, with a cocktail area specializing in Japanese whiskies. Guests can access it from inside the lobby or, through an exterior staircase tucked between the hotel’s main entrance and a longstanding guitar shop that leads into a small, subterranean garden passageway. Nine of Yokoi’s paintings from throughout her career will be on display and, a few blocks over, 25 others will comprise a gallery survey co-curated by her grandson, Tai, who also oversees her estate. Titled “Noh Theater,” it draws parallels between that traditional form of Japanese performance and the artist’s work. Both often employ tea paper (the former for its programs) and are characterized by “slow, deliberate and symbolic movements,” as Tai writes in an accompanying essay. Kayo says her mother had a history of showing her work beyond galleries: After relocating her family to Switzerland following the dissolution of her marriage to the painter Sam Francis, Yokoi exhibited her work in public spaces like restaurants and hospitals. “She wanted to bring beauty and create a refuge from this tumultuous world,” Kayo says. “I think she would be very happy about this.” The restaurant Teruko will open in mid-May; “Noh Theater” is on view from May 1 through Jun. 14, hollistaggart.com.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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R.B. Schlather’s vibrant staging of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” playing in the Hudson Valley, is a bright spot in a bleak landscape for Baroque work.New York City Opera had recently shuttered when the director R.B. Schlather started to present Handel operas in a white-box gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan about 10 years ago. Those spare, surreal stagings of “Alcina” and “Orlando” felt like an elegy for City Opera’s innovative productions, and for its devotion to Handel — most famously, a landmark 1960s “Giulio Cesare” starring Beverly Sills.Now, as Schlather’s vibrant vision for “Giulio Cesare” plays at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., the landscape for opera — especially Baroque opera — is even bleaker in New York City, two hours south by train.The Metropolitan Opera, whose 4,000-seat theater isn’t a natural fit for early music, does less than it used to, and it’s become more or less the only game in town. City Opera was revived in name, but as a wan shadow of its former self. The Brooklyn Academy of Music used to be a destination for revelatory Baroque stagings by the likes of Les Arts Florissants; no more. Lincoln Center, ditto. Carnegie Hall presents Harry Bicket’s English Concert in a single Handel performance a year — on May 4 it’s, yes, “Cesare” — but unstaged, in concert.Upstate, Schlather has been unfurling a series of Handel productions with the terrific period-instrument ensemble Ruckus; “Cesare,” running through May 2, comes on the heels of “Rodelinda” at Hudson Hall in 2023. It is a precious bastion of an ever rarer breed.His directorial style in dealing with this composer’s works has gotten clearer with experience. “Alcina” and “Orlando” were always quirky, often thrilling and sometimes bewildering. But this substantially yet intelligently trimmed “Cesare” — with intermission, it’s just under three hours — is a stylishly straightforward account of a story of vengeance and lust set amid Julius Caesar’s campaign to conquer both Egypt and Cleopatra. Hudson Hall has a proscenium, but Schlather’s set pushes the action downstage in front of it with two angled walls painted iridescent black. Under Masha Tsimring’s stark, shadow-throwing lighting, those walls twinkle like a starry sky.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
