Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Elections

    Israel and Iran Trade Attacks as Toll From Conflict Mounts

    The path to diplomacy appeared to narrow after officials called off talks that had been set for Sunday between Tehran and Washington on Iran’s nuclear program.Israel and Iran exchanged more missile attacks on population centers on Sunday, brushing aside international calls to halt what has quickly become the fiercest clash in decades between the two sworn enemies.The path to diplomacy appeared to narrow after officials called off talks that had been set for Sunday between Tehran and Washington on the future of Iran’s nuclear program.In unleashing a series of powerful strikes starting on Friday, Israel said its goal was to disable Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It appeared unlikely that this has been accomplished, experts say, and with each side vowing to pursue attacks, civilians in both countries were seeking shelter where they could.A semi-official Iranian news agency, ISNA, released photos of what it said was the aftermath of an Israeli strike Sunday that hit a residential neighborhood in central Tehran. The photos showed some people fleeing, carrying young children. Two men could be seen lying on the pavement bleeding as people tried to tend to their injuries. And a woman stood crying as she held an infant whose clothes and feet were covered in blood.Noa Shkuri, a resident in Rehovot, Israel, after her home was struck by a missile on Sunday morning.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThe skies of Tehran, the Iranian capital, were aglow with flames from burning fuel reservoirs overnight after Israeli fighter jets bombarded the country’s vital oil and gas industries.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

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Joel Shapiro, Celebrated Post-Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 83

    His stick-figure sculptures conveyed a surprising depth of emotion, hinting at the threat of imbalance. He also produced more than 30 large-scale commissions.Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.A sculpture by Mr. Shapiro was unveiled at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2019.Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesDespite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview for this obituary in 2024.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

  • 88 Shares189 Views

    in Elections

    Diplomacy With Iran Is Damaged, Not Dead

    The push to do a deal on the country’s nuclear program could be revived, even after the Israeli strikes scuppered the latest round of talks.If war is diplomacy by other means, diplomacy is never finished. While Israel and Iran are in the midst of what could be an extended war that could spread, the possibility of renewed talks to deal with Iran’s expanding nuclear program should not be discounted.Negotiations are on hold while the war continues, and the future of diplomacy is far from clear. Iran will feel compelled to respond to Israel, and the Israeli campaign could last for days or weeks. For now Washington does not appear to be doing anything to press both sides to stop the violence and start talking again.But the Iranians say they still want a deal, as does President Trump. The shape of future talks will inevitably depend on when and how the fighting stops.“We are prepared for any agreement aimed at ensuring Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told foreign diplomats in Tehran on Sunday. But his country would not accept any deal that “deprives Iran of its nuclear rights,” he added, including the right to enrich uranium, albeit at low levels that can be used for civilian purposes.Mr. Araghchi said Israel did not attack to pre-empt Iran’s race toward a bomb, which Iran denies trying to develop, but to derail negotiations on a deal that Mr. Netanyahu opposes.The attacks are “an attempt to undermine diplomacy and derail negotiations,” he continued, a view shared by various Western analysts. “It is entirely clear that the Israeli regime does not want any agreement on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It does not want negotiations and does not seek diplomacy.”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

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Elections

    What to Know About the New Head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps

    Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi was appointed to lead the group after his predecessor, Gen. Hossein Salami, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.Iran named Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as the new head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps after his predecessor, Gen. Hossein Salami, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday.Here’s what to know about the new leader of a group created to defend Iran’s Islamic system.Brig. Gen. Vahidi is best known outside Iran as a suspect in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more.Prosecutors in Argentina have issued arrest warrants for five Iranian officials, including General Vahidi, for “conceiving, planning, financing and executing” the attack. Interpol issued an alert, known as a Red Notice, in 2007 to inform the international law enforcement community that a national arrest warrant was outstanding.General Vahidi was born in 1958 in the central Iranian city of Shiraz. During the Iranian revolution in 1979, he had been studying electronic engineering at Shiraz University and around that time he joined the I.R.G.C., as well as revolutionary committees, according to Iranian media. He later received a Ph.D. in strategic studies.During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, he held a number of senior security roles. He went on to lead the I.R.G.C.’s Quds Force, which specializes in intelligence and directs operations outside Iran, from 1988 until 1998.From 2005, General Vahidi served as deputy defense minister and he was made defense minister in 2009, holding the post until 2013. He was also Iran’s interior minister for three years until last August.The United States, the European Union, Canada and Britain have imposed sanctions on General Vahidi for human rights violations. More

  • 188 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    In Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, Iran’s missile barrages killed at least six people.

    Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to name the victims publicly.Orange-vested emergency workers were clambering over rubble on Sunday morning in the central Israeli coastal city of Bat Yam in the wake of an Iranian missile strike that killed at least six people and wounded scores of others.Paramedics were still trying to save three people who were trapped under debris, according to the Israeli military, hours after the missile evaded Israel’s air defenses. Four people remained unaccounted for, the military said.Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to publicly name the victims. Chaotic scenes were replicated across northern and central Israel after a long night of Iranian missile attacks.Many Israelis have a certain nonchalance about missile fire, the product of both near-constant rocket attacks and the country’s sophisticated aerial defenses. But the destructive attacks in Bat Yam and elsewhere overnight — in which 10 people were confirmed killed — underscored how Israel’s current escalation with heavily armed Iran differs from fighting armed paramilitaries like Hamas and Hezbollah.In Rehovot, another city south of Tel Aviv, debris from the overnight attack filled the streets. Bloodstained bandages and white surgical gloves lay by a roadside bench. Rescue workers picked through shattered glass, searching for survivors.“Is there anyone inside?” a police officer shouted, peering into a shop damaged by the strikes.In Bat Yam, hundreds of residents who had evacuated their homes near the blast site — many of which were left uninhabitable by the explosion — gathered at a nearby school to wait for officials to tell them where to go.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 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Alex Polikoff, Who Won a Marathon Housing Segregation Case, Dies at 98

    He notched a victory in a Supreme Court decision against the City of Chicago in 1976. He then spent over 40 years making sure the ruling was enforced.Alex Polikoff, who won a landmark discrimination case before the Supreme Court in 1976 showing that the City of Chicago had segregated Black and white public housing residents, and who then spent decades fighting to make sure that the court’s will was enforced, died on May 27 at his home in Keene, N.H. He was 98.His daughter Eve Kodiak confirmed the death.Mr. Polikoff’s class-action lawsuit, known as Gautreaux after its lead plaintiff, Dorothy Gautreaux, ranks among the most important decisions in the history of civil rights litigation.Ms. Gautreaux, a public-housing resident, and her five co-plaintiffs claimed that the Chicago Housing Authority had systematically funneled Black residents into a small number of poorly constructed high-rise complexes, which became havens of crime and drug use.Such segregation was an open secret in Chicago, and the subject of decades of protest — Mr. Polikoff filed the case in August 1966, just months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his own grass-roots campaign to desegregate the city.But Chicago, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, pushed back. Dr. King left the city without success, while Mr. Polikoff spent a decade fighting the city in court. Ms. Gautreaux died in 1968, eight years before the case reached the Supreme Court.By then, the lawsuit had been combined with a similar suit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In oral arguments before the court, Mr. Polikoff squared off against one of his former classmates from the University of Chicago Law School: Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general.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

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    Heat of Air India Crash Hinders DNA Identification, Agonizing Relatives

    Three days after the crash, only 35 bodies had been handed over to relatives from an overall official death toll of 270.The intensity of the flames from the crash of Air India Flight 171 has made the identification of passenger remains a mammoth task, medical officials in India said on Sunday, as relatives of more than 200 victims waited outside a mortuary for a third day.The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner was carrying 125,000 liters, or more than 33,000 gallons, of fuel when it crashed on Thursday, a full load for a nearly 10-hour flight from Ahmedabad to Gatwick Airport near London.Senior health officials in Ahmedabad told a visiting delegation on Saturday that initial findings indicated that temperatures at the crash site had reached 1,500 degrees Celsius, or 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, according to two people who attended the briefing. Such temperatures are more than enough to incinerate bodies.H.P. Sanghvi, the director of the forensic lab where most of the DNA samples are being sent, told the Indian news media that the damage to the bodies made collection and testing difficult.“These high temperatures affect the DNA present in various parts of the body,” Mr. Sanghvi said. “This process is very complex.”By Sunday evening, only 35 bodies had been handed over to relatives, among an overall official death toll of 270 from inside the plane and on the ground.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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Trump’s Parade Drafted the Army Into a War of Images

    After a week of stunning and sobering TV-news scenes, the brassy Trumpy production was a surreal viewing experience.Officially, the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary military parade through Washington was meant to be a straightforward celebration of the service’s history.But as it played out on live TV Saturday, history was overwhelmed by the stormy present.The first complication was the fact that the Army shared a birthday with President Trump, making the military procession seem gift-wrapped for a leader who for years has had one on his wish list. To some, the spectacle smacked of the gaudy self-celebrations thrown by strongmen; to others, it was a symbol of resurgent American strength.Maybe at another time, the parade could have been the mundane, even dull bit of civic history that on the surface it was. But once conscripted into Mr. Trump’s war of imagery, a tank cannot be just a tank.The event also came at the end of a tumultuous week of shocking TV images. It came after the National Guard and Marines were deployed to Los Angeles to quell protests, over the objections of local leaders. It came after Senator Alex Padilla of California was forced to the ground and handcuffed after he tried to ask a question of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at a news conference. It came after Mr. Trump gave a political-rally-like speech to cheering troops at Fort Bragg. On top of this were volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran and, on Saturday morning, the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and the attempted murder of another.The result, as it rolled across our screens, was anything but an uncomplicated celebration. It was a split-screen presentation for a split country, in a world that seemed to be riven apart.The major broadcast networks did not carry the parade. CNN and MSNBC covered it on and off, along with the Middle East and Minnesota news, as well as the “No Kings” protests across the country that accused Mr. Trump of antidemocratic overreach.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