Aurelia Butler

A New York City ferry captain saw the luggage and called the Police Department’s Harbor Unit. The authorities have not identified the remains.A New York City ferry captain on Wednesday discovered a suitcase drifting in the East River that turned out to have a human torso inside, according to an internal police report.The captain, who was aboard the vessel Susan B. Anthony, saw the luggage floating in the water late Wednesday afternoon near Governors Island, a largely recreational area just off the southern tip of Manhattan, according to the report.Unable to fish it out of the river, the captain called the Police Department’s Harbor Unit for help, the report said. Officers from the unit pulled the suitcase from the water at around 5:30 p.m. and, after seeing what was inside, brought it to Pier 16 on the East Side of Manhattan, about a quarter-mile south of the Brooklyn Bridge, the police said.The authorities have not been able to identify the remains. A spokeswoman for the city medical examiner said the office would perform an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of the person’s death.Reached on Thursday, the ferry captain declined to comment.The discovery of body parts in New York City’s waters is uncommon, but not unheard-of. A human head was found in Jamaica Bay in Queens last May. Then, in August, other human remains began to wash up on the shore of Brooklyn Bridge Park, just steps from its early-20th-century carousel. Over the course of several weeks, officers found a human skull, leg fragments, vertebrae and two feet inside a pair of construction boots, according to another internal police report.News reports of such discoveries date back more than a century. In 1900, the body of a longshoreman was found floating in the East River just below East Ninth Street in Manhattan, according to an Oct. 1 article published that year in The Evening World, a turn-of-the-century newspaper.In another case, authorities in 1967 pulled a man’s body from the Hudson River, according to a New York Daily News article from Aug. 19 of that year. The police later identified the man as 62-year-old Joseph Robert Juliano, who had Mafia ties. More

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. The New York Times More

The men are accused of supplying key parts in Iranian drones that killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens of others at an American military base in Jordan.The Justice Department has charged two men with illegally supplying parts used in an Iranian-backed militia’s drone attack in January that killed three U.S. service members and injured more than 40 others at an American military base in Jordan, federal prosecutors in Boston announced on Monday.Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi, 42, a dual U.S.-Iranian national of Natick, Mass., and Mohammad Abedini, 38, of Tehran, were charged with conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components to Iran, violating American export control and sanctions laws.Mr. Abedini was also charged with providing material support, resulting in death, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian military that the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization.Mr. Sadeghi was arrested on Monday and made an initial appearance in the federal court in Boston. Mr. Abedini was arrested, also on Monday, in Italy by Italian authorities at the request of the United States.Iran has made serious advances in the design and production of military drones in recent years, and has stepped up its transfer to terrorist groups across the Middle East, including Hamas and Hezbollah.Iran has used its drone program to build its global importance and increase weapons sales but has suffered setbacks in its confrontation with Israel. In April, Iran launched an attack on Israel that largely failed. Israel intercepted most of the roughly 200 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.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

Kathy Lowden makes a few changes.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTUESDAY PUZZLE — When the cold weather first sets in, which often happens right around this time of year in New York City, the gloomy, chilly days that sweep through can bring about the winter blues. On days like those, I am especially grateful for the reliably sunny experience of solving a crossword. You can have your SAD lamp; it’s word puzzles for me (and possibly for some of you, too).It’s particularly delightful amid such melancholy to encounter a puzzle constructed by Kathy Lowden, because she is an utter whiz at whimsical themes. On Halloween last year, she collaborated with Erik Piepenburg, a writer and horror columnist, to pull off the perfect fright of a puzzle, in which movie titles combined to form a scary story. This October, she brought us a series of witty rhymes for groups of various people and things: dozens of cousins, oodles of poodles and so on. Today’s theme uses wordplay of another kind, but retains Ms. Lowden’s signature winking style of humor. Let’s smile on it together, shall we?Today’s ThemeThere are technically only two terms in today’s themed entries, but their cleverness is in triplicate. A [Snide comment about a collectible figurine?], for instance, is a KNICKKNACK KNOCK (17A). A [Kerfuffle over beach footwear?] would be a FLIP-FLOP FLAP (26A). If you’re experiencing a [Feeling of guilt after cheating at table tennis?], it might be referred to as a PINGPONG PANG (48A). And [Singer Parton when she’s aimlessly wasting time?] is DILLYDALLY DOLLY (63A).Only the vowels change from syllable to syllable, and the effect is just wondrous. It reminded me of a tongue-twister that we used in my college acting classes to warm up our voices, though that had decidedly darker instances of alliteration than those used in today’s grid:To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dockIn a pestilential prison with a lifelong lockAwaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shockFrom a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.Tricky Clues33A. As someone without a putting bone in her body, I don’t quite relate to the idea that GOLF is [“a good walk spoiled,” per Mark Twain]. The implication, as I understand it, is that an otherwise pleasant walk through green fields is rendered monotonous when it’s just for a round of golf. To my mind, the quote makes more sense if the “good walk” being spoiled is that of a non-golfer’s when hit in the head by a stray ball.40A/7D. If you discover two identical clues in a puzzle — in this grid, it’s [“Scram!”] — you’ve stumbled onto what we call twin clues. Be careful, though: While the hints may have similar meanings, their entries are never “twins.” At 40A, [“Scram!”] solves to GIT! At 7D, the same clue solves to SCAT!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

Forecasters said tsunami waves hitting the coastline of the Pacific Island nation could reach up to a meter, or 3.2 feet, above the tide level.A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck near the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu early Tuesday afternoon local time, according to the United States Geological Survey.The epicenter of the earthquake was about 18 miles off the coast of Port Vila, Vanuatu’s coastal capital, the agency said. The country is about 1,000 miles northeast of Australia and comprises over 80 islands with a population of about 300,000.Tsunami waves reaching up to 3.2 feet above the tide level were possible for some costal areas of Vanuatu, the U.S. Tsunami Warning System said. Waves of less than one foot were possible for the coasts of nearby island nations like Fiji, Kiribati and New Caledonia, it said.This is a developing story. More

Inside Abundant Life Christian School, a chilling message came over the intercom late Monday morning: “Lockdown. This is not a drill.”Teachers herded students out of view, a sixth-grader recalled. Then there was banging, and screaming. “Everybody started freaking out,” said the student, Breken Ives.The sirens came minutes later.“Police car after police car,” said John Diaz de Leon, a retiree in his 60s who lives near the school in Madison, Wis., and who soon headed outside to see what was bringing so many squad cars to usually quiet Buckeye Road.It would be hours before anyone knew any of the details that the police disclosed in a series of news conferences — including that the shooter was a student at the small private school, and that a teacher and a fellow student had been killed and six others injured.Mr. Diaz de Leon had tuned into a police scanner and heard the words “triage” and “D.O.A.” — dead on arrival. Outside the school, he watched as two police officers with long guns drawn approached the school building, leading a police dog. Soon, groups of students began running out, some coatless and holding hands.All around Madison, parents began to rush toward the school. One father, Mike Brube, was blocks away at work, he said, when he saw the police cruisers screaming by, sirens blaring.He drove straight to the school where his seventh-grader, Angel, had been enrolled throughout childhood. “The school is Christian, and it’s like a family place,” Mr. Brube said.Viktoriya Gonzales was among the parents who waited anxiously near the school for hours to be reunited with their children. Some of the students were held back to talk with police officers as the authorities began to investigate.Ms. Gonzales had heard from other students that her son, 12, was safe but “severely traumatized, because he was right by the shooter.”“That’s all I know,” she said. More

The man, Zephen Xaver, 27, will have his case automatically appealed to the Florida Supreme Court.A Florida man who killed five women inside a bank in January 2019 by forcing them to lie down on the floor as he fatally shot each one was sentenced to death on Monday.The man, Zephen Xaver, 27, methodically carried out the killings in the lobby of a SunTrust Bank in Sebring, Fla. In text messages to an ex-girlfriend minutes before the killings he wrote that he “always wanted to kill people so I’m going to try it today and see how it goes,” according to court documents.Brian Haas, a Florida prosecutor, described Mr. Xaver’s actions as systematic. He said that Mr. Xaver had planned the slayings, from getting his driver’s license to obtain the firearm used in the shooting that day to entering the bank only after a male customer left it.Zephen XaverHighlands County Sheriff’s Office, via Associated PressIn an interview after the sentencing, Mr. Haas, who had sought the death penalty against Mr. Xaver, called the killings “horrific” and said that the State Attorney’s Office had “worked very hard to secure these sentences.“He did this because he wanted to find out what it felt like to kill someone, and he planned it,” said Mr. Haas, the state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit of Florida.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

The woman, Svetlana Dali, had been ordered to wear an ankle monitor after her arrest, but she cut it off and boarded a bus, a law enforcement official said.The woman who stowed away on a plane from New York City to Paris late last month was arrested on Monday after trying to leave the country again, this time on a bus bound for Canada, two law enforcement officials said.The woman, Svetlana Dali, had been released and ordered to wear an ankle monitor after a Dec. 5 federal court hearing in Brooklyn on a charge of stowing away aboard a Delta Air Lines plane to Paris from Kennedy International Airport.Ms. Dali, 57, a U.S. permanent resident who emigrated from Russia, was supposed to stay at a friend’s apartment in Philadelphia, one of the officials said. But she cut off her monitor and made her way to upstate New York, where she rode a bus toward the Canadian border, the official said.Ms. Dali had a ticket for that ride, the official said, unlike the flight to Paris. She was charged with sneaking aboard that flight without a boarding pass or a passport.On Monday night, Ms. Dali was in custody in Buffalo, Barbara Burns, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of New York, said. Ms. Dali is scheduled to appear in court there on Tuesday afternoon before Magistrate Judge Michael J. Roemer and then to be returned to custody in Brooklyn, Ms. Burns said.Phone and email messages left for the lawyer who represented Ms. Dali in court in Brooklyn, Michael Schneider, were not returned.Ms. Dali’s arrest on Monday was previously reported by CNN.To get to Paris last month, Ms. Dali exploited weaknesses in the security system at Kennedy during the busiest period of the year for air travel by blending in with crowds of boarding travelers, prosecutors in Brooklyn said.She slipped past a checkpoint by mixing in with the flight crew of a Spanish airline and then walked, undetected by Delta employees, onto a fully booked plane, they said. During the seven-hour flight, Ms. Dali tried to avoid notice by ducking into the aircraft’s bathrooms.Delta returned Ms. Dali to Kennedy after she had spent about a week in the custody of French authorities. She was arrested there by F.B.I. agents.At Ms. Dali’s first appearance in court in Brooklyn this month, Brooke Theodora, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said, “We’re concerned for a risk of flight here rather than the nature of the offense.”Olivia Bensimon More