Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares

    in Elections

    Sandstorm Turns Iraq’s Skies Orange and Sends Thousands to Hospitals

    Climate experts say such storms are becoming more frequent and severe in the country. This was its worst of the year so far.A severe sandstorm has swept across central and southern Iraq over the last two days, turning the sky a strange orange, reducing visibility in some places to less than a half mile and sending several thousand people to emergency rooms with respiratory problems.Two airports suspended flights because of poor visibility, and the usually crowded highways of Basra, the largest city in the country’s south, were nearly empty as high winds whipped through the palm trees and aboveground electrical lines.The spokesman for Iraq’s meteorology department, Amir al-Jabri, said that the “heavy waves of dust” had blown across the country after originating in eastern Saudi Arabia, a largely desert area, and picking up additional particles in southwestern Iraq, which is similarly arid.Although sandstorms have long been a feature of Iraq’s winter and early spring, climate experts say the storms are becoming more frequent and severe as the country and neighboring Syria experience longer and more frequent droughts and as desertification engulfs larger and larger areas of once-fertile land.The Shatt al-Arab waterway in Basra, Iraq. The city’s normally busy highways were emptied by the sandstorm.Hussein Faleh/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe storm was the worst so far in Iraq in 2025, but a similarly serious storm paralyzed Baghdad in December, and there were several severe sandstorms in 2022.The United Nations counts Iraq as the fifth most vulnerable country to some aspects of climate change, including extreme temperatures and the diminishing availability of water.Although the storm abated on Tuesday and temperatures were a bit lower, southern Iraq was experiencing daily highs of more than 100 degrees before the sandstorm obscured the sun, reducing the temperature.During the most recent storm, many people donned face masks for protection, especially police officers and emergency workers who were working outside, while others wrapped cloths around their mouths.Using a respiratory in an ambulance in Najaf, a central city where hospitals reported hundreds of patients with breathing difficulties.Qassem Al-Kaabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe sand and dust were so pervasive that they penetrated almost every house and vehicle, coming through the smallest cracks to coat every surface, making it difficult to work on computers and forcing almost all but emergency workers to stay indoors.Iraq’s health ministry spokesman, Saif al-Badr, said that emergency rooms across the south had received 3,747 cases of Iraqis suffering respiratory problems as a result of the storm. More than 1,000 of those were recorded in Basra, where the storm was especially severe on Monday, and 451 were in Najaf, a far smaller city, he said.Also badly affected were residents of Muthanna Province, which shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, he said, adding that most of the thousands who were treated for respiratory problems had been released.The Basra police department put out a list of storm instructions, including one directed at families: “Since the storm is accompanied by frightening sounds for young children, parents should explain what is happening so that their child can sleep soundly.”Visibility in Basra was severely limited.Hussein Faleh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

  • 125 Shares18 Views

    in Elections

    Attackers Target Prisons in France, Burning Vehicles and Firing Shots

    The office of France’s counterterrorism prosecutor said it would begin an investigation into the violence. The justice minister blamed drug traffickers.Attackers targeted a prison near the French port city of Toulon overnight Monday to Tuesday, burning vehicles and firing shots at its walls, French authorities and a union said on Tuesday, adding that this was part of a series of attacks on the country’s prisons.There were no reports of casualties. A union for prison workers, FO Justice, posted photos on X, formerly Twitter, of bullet holes in prison walls, saying that prisons had been attacked in the north, center and south of the country.The office of France’s counterterrorism prosecutor said it would begin an investigation into the violence, which it said started on Sunday. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, said he would visit the Toulon-La Farlède prison on Tuesday in support of the officers there.Bullet holes in a wall of the Toulon-La Farlède prison on Tuesday.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Darmanin suggested that drug traffickers had organized the attacks. The French newspaper Le Monde said the attacks were coordinated and mentioned other incidents in Villepinte and Nanterre, both suburbs of Paris; Valence, a city in southern France; and the southern port city of Marseille.“Prisons are facing intimidation attempts ranging from the burning of vehicles to automatic gunfire,” Mr. Darmanin said in a post on social media. “The republic is confronted by drug trafficking and will take measures that will massively disrupt these criminal networks.”France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, condemned the attacks, saying the prisons had been targeted by thugs, and ordered the authorities to reinforce security at prisons and protect their workers.France’s official prison watchdog warned in 2023 of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and violence in the country’s prisons. More

  • 163 Shares28 Views

    in Elections

    Review: In ‘John Proctor Is the Villain,’ It’s the Girls vs. the Men

    Kimberly Belflower’s play, on Broadway starring Sadie Sink, gives high school students a chance to prosecute a #MeToo case against “The Crucible.”The first word spoken in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.”Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift.It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since #MeToo acquired its hashtag, that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action. But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.”“Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks.Others have experienced worse.But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr. Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ.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

  • 150 Shares17 Views

    in Elections

    Missing Rotor Is Recovered From Site of Helicopter Crash in Hudson River

    The aircraft was on a sightseeing flight when it suddenly broke apart in midair, its rotor blades falling separately toward the water.When rescue crews reached the passenger compartment of the helicopter that plunged into the Hudson River on Thursday, killing all six of its occupants, the aircraft was missing several critical components, including the rotor and blades that had kept it aloft.On Monday afternoon, four days after the fatal crash, investigators fished several of those missing pieces out of the river, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that is leading the investigation to determine the cause.Divers from the New York Police Department, working with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Jersey City Office of Emergency Management, recovered the helicopter’s main rotor system, its transmission and roof beam, the safety board said late Monday.The helicopter, a Bell 206L-4 LongRanger operated by New York Helicopter Tours, was on a sightseeing flight over the river on Thursday when it suddenly broke apart in midair.Videos posted on social media showed the rotor blades and part of the aircraft’s tail falling separately toward the water. The main body of the helicopter plummeted into the water on the western side of the river near Jersey City, N.J., and then floated upside down.The passengers — Agustín Escobar, Mercè Camprubí Montal and their three young children, Agustín, Mercè and Víctor — were all killed. The pilot, Seankese Johnson, also died.The chief executive of New York Helicopter, Michael Roth, said last week that he had no information about what had happened to the helicopter, which took off from a heliport in Lower Manhattan and was headed back there when it crashed.The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial air transportation, said on Sunday night that New York Helicopter had stopped taking customers on tours after the crash.Then on Monday night, the F.A.A. issued an emergency order to shut down New York Helicopter for safety reasons. The agency said that, after the crash, the company’s director of operations, Jason Costello, had said it would suspend operations. But within half an hour, Mr. Roth contacted the agency to say he had not authorized a suspension of operations and that Mr. Costello no longer worked for him.The F.A.A. called the “intentional firing” of Mr. Costello a retaliation and determined that it left the company without “sufficient qualified management and technical personnel to ensure the safety of its operations.”The transportation safety board said that its efforts to recover pieces of the helicopter had concluded. But its investigation is just getting underway.The safety board’s staff will conduct interviews and study the wreckage and the operator’s maintenance records to try to determine why the helicopter had broken apart. Its investigations often take several months and sometimes are not concluded for more than a year.On Tuesday, the safety board is holding a hearing to discuss its final report on a fire aboard a ship in Newark, in which two members of Newark’s fire department died. That fire happened in July 2023. More

  • 125 Shares25 Views

    in Elections

    New York Times Crossword Answers for Tuesday, April 15, 2025

    Per Bykodorov makes his New York Times Crossword debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTUESDAY PUZZLE — Step right up, puzzle lovers, step right up! The theme of today’s crossword, constructed by Per Bykodorov in his New York Times debut, hinges on an expression that probably comes from the traveling carnivals of the 19th century.Let’s take a spin and test our luck together, shall we? Unlike most of the unapologetically rigged games at carnivals, this puzzle can be played fair and square(s).Today’s ThemeRound and round the circled letters go, and what they mean, nobody knows! Now that I’ve run out of carnival barks, though, I can explain what’s going on.Four rows of this puzzle contain a set of five circled letters each. An identical number of circles repeated across rows or columns usually indicates some kind of anagram-based theme. We can confirm this by solving a couple of the entries that contain those circled letters. 16A, [Like a film that’s both sad and funny], solves to TRAGICOMIC, and 22A, [Ben & Jerry’s flavor honoring a jam band legend], to CHERRY GARCIA. This makes a couple of things clear: The letters we’re working with are A-C-G-I-R, and the answer almost certainly has to do with what they unscramble to spell — CIGAR.Carnival games apparently used to offer liquor and smokes as top prizes, even above all the giant stuffed animals! That would certainly explain how the baby in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” got his hands on a stogie. In any case, it’s as sensible an explanation as any for why we use the phrase at the center of today’s puzzle to mean [Not quite right] — CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR (35A). And it also tells us what’s going on with the circled letters: They’re never arranged in the right order to spell “cigar.”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

  • 75 Shares27 Views

    in Elections

    The Vibe Shifts Against the Right

    Alex Kaschuta’s podcast, “Subversive,” used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men’s rights activists and purveyors of “scientific” racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like “Raw Egg Nationalist” and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference as Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio.Finding progressive conventional wisdom hollow and unfulfilling, Kaschuta was attracted to the contrarian narratives and esoteric ideas of the thinkers and influencers sometimes known as the “dissident right.” They presented liberal modernity — with its emphasis on racial and gender equality, global cooperation, secularism and orderly democratic processes — as a Matrix-like illusion sustained by ideological coercion, and themselves as the holders of freedom-giving red pills.For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. “There’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,” she wrote on her blog. “A frontier opens up.”But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.”Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)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

  • 113 Shares24 Views

    in Elections

    Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump is ‘of Momentous Significance’

    But a fight with the nation’s oldest, richest and most elite university is a battle that President Trump and his powerful aide, Stephen Miller, want to have.Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.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

  • 113 Shares14 Views

    in Elections

    Court Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Shuttering of Migrant Entry Program

    A federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Monday from ending a signature Biden-era program that allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from four troubled countries to enter the country and work legally.The administration moved in late March to shut down the program by April 24, which offered migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti temporary legal status in the United States. Judge Indira Talwani, of the Federal District Court in Boston, said the program’s termination put thousands of immigrants at imminent risk of deportation hearings once their legal status expires in less than two weeks.Judge Talwani blocked the wholesale shutdown of the program. Otherwise, she wrote in her ruling, the migrants would “be forced to choose between two injurious options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings.”Immigrant advocates hailed the decision as a win for those worried about the imminent stripping of their status.“This ruling is a victory not just for our clients and those like them, but anyone who cherishes the freedom to welcome,” said Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy group. “Our clients — and our class members — have done everything the government asked of them, and we’re gratified to see that the court will not allow the government to fail to uphold its side of the bargain.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The judge’s decision came as the Trump administration has moved to end legal protections for migrants from many countries, including by shutting down a program granting legal status to Afghan and Cameroonian migrants. A separate effort to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans in the United States was also blocked by a federal judge.The Biden-era program allowed more migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to fly into the United States and stay temporarily with access to work permits if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks. They were allowed to stay for up to two years.More than 500,000 migrants entered the country under the program. Biden officials said it was part of an effort to deter migrants from those countries from crossing into the country illegally, and encourage a legal pathway instead.Trump officials, announcing the move to end the program last month, said the program added to immigration problems in the United States by granting some protections to “a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status.” More