Aurelia Butler

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    International Students Worry Even as Trump Temporarily Restores Some Legal Statuses

    Students and their immigration lawyers say they were relieved for the temporary reprieve, but emphasized that it was just that — temporary.When Karl Molden, a sophomore at Harvard University from Vienna, learned that the Trump administration had abruptly restored thousands of international students’ ability to legally study in the United States, he said he did not feel reassured.After all, immigration officials have insisted that they could still terminate students’ legal status, even in the face of legal challenges, and the administration has characterized the matter as only a temporary reprieve.“They shouldn’t tempt us into thinking that the administration will stop harassing us,” Mr. Molden said. “They will try to find other ways.”Mr. Molden is not alone in his worry.The dramatic shift from the administration on Friday came after scores of international students filed lawsuits saying that their legal right to study in the United States had been rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. In others, there appeared to be no obvious reason for the revocations.After learning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deleted their records from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, many students sued to try to save their status. That prompted a flurry of emergency orders by judges that blocked the changes.Students and their immigration lawyers said on Saturday that they were relieved for the temporary reprieve, but emphasized that it was just that — temporary.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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    Palestinian Leader Abbas Appoints Hussein al-Sheikh as Deputy Amid Succession Fears

    For many ordinary Palestinians, the appointment of Hussein al-Sheikh was emblematic of how out-of-touch the leadership of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority has become.Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank met this week for the first gathering of its kind in years. Their mission: to allow Mahmoud Abbas, the aging Palestinian Authority president, to appoint a longtime loyalist to a newly minted senior position. On Saturday night, Mr. Abbas formally named Hussein al-Sheikh, a close confidant, as his deputy. Some analysts believed Mr. al-Sheikh’s promotion indicated that Mr. Abbas, 89, was signaling that Mr. al-Sheikh was his preferred heir, while others saw it as a cosmetic reshuffle to placate Arab officials frustrated by the Palestinian leader.For many Palestinians, their leadership’s focus on palace politics as the war in Gaza has raged, and a sweeping Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank has displaced tens of thousands of people, has further underscored the complacency of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority. “The ship is sinking, and everyone’s fighting over who’s going to be seated at what table,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Mr. Abbas and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research group. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war began with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostage. The war cast a spotlight on the Palestinian cause and spurred worldwide protests. But the frail and internally divided Palestinian Authority — the Palestinians’ internationally recognized representative — has struggled for relevance. 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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    David Thomas, Leader of the Band Pere Ubu, Dies at 71

    David Thomas, the singer and songwriter who led Pere Ubu and other bands that stretched the parameters of punk and art-rock, died on Wednesday in Brighton and Hove, England. He was 71.Mr. Thomas had suffered from kidney disease, but the announcement of his death, on Pere Ubu’s Facebook and Instagram sites, did not specify a cause, citing only “a long illness.” He lived in Brighton and Hove, but the announcement did not say if he died at home.Through five decades of recordings and performances, Mr. Thomas maintained an audacious, unpredictable, ornery and ambitious spirit. He perpetually defied and upended structures and expectations, and he reveled in dissonance and unsprung sounds.In the mid-1970s, at the dawn of punk rock, Pere Ubu described itself as “avant-garage.” And as punk developed its own constraints and conventions, Mr. Thomas purposefully warped or ignored them. When late-’70s punk bands sported T-shirts, leather and ripped jeans, he performed in a suit and tie. And while much of his music stayed grounded in rock, he also delved into chamber music, cabaret, electronics and improvisation.Mr. Thomas in performance in 1979. Big-boned and overweight, he wielded his bulk proudly onstage. David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesHis voice was always distinctive: a liquid, androgynous tenor that he pushed to its limits and beyond — crooning, chanting, whooping, muttering, barking, burbling, yelling. His lyrics could be apocalyptic, free-associative, mocking, euphoric, cryptic or startlingly direct. Onstage, gesticulating vehemently, he veered between endearing and irascible.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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    U.S. Reverses Itself, Saying U.N.’s Gaza Agency Can Be Sued in New York

    The Justice Department and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office told a judge that an immunity law did not apply. A group of Israelis had accused the agency of assisting Hamas.Reversing a Biden administration position, President Trump’s Justice Department argued that a lawsuit could proceed in Manhattan that accuses a United Nations agency of providing more than $1 billion that helped to enable Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.The lawsuit says that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency allowed Hamas to siphon off the organization’s funds to help build a terrorist infrastructure that included tunneling equipment and weapons that supported the attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage.The Biden administration argued last year that UNRWA could not be sued because it was part of the United Nations, which enjoys immunity from such lawsuits.But the Justice Department told a federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday that neither UNRWA nor the agency officials named in the lawsuit were entitled to immunity.“The complaint in this case alleges atrocious conduct on the part of UNRWA and its officers,” the department wrote in a letter to Judge Analisa Torres of Federal District Court, adding, “The government believes they must answer these allegations in American courts.”“The prior administration’s view that they do not was wrong,” the department said.The letter was submitted by Yaakov M. Roth, a senior Justice Department official, and Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.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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    Canadian Snowbirds Bought Into the American Dream in Palm Springs. Was It a Mirage?

    On the night of the 2024 presidential election, Ken James, a retired engineer from Calgary, Alberta, was at his second home in Palm Springs, Calif., watching with dismay as the results rolled in.Mr. James, 68, called his wife back in Calgary. “If he gets back in, I’m selling,” he recalled her saying of Donald Trump.Mr. James is among hundreds of thousands of Canadians, many of them snowbirds, who each year flock to Palm Springs, a sunbaked resort city about 110 miles east of Los Angeles that is known for its midcentury architecture, otherworldly desert and art scene. For nearly five months a year, when temperatures are often below freezing in Calgary, Mr. James and his wife spend languid days by the pool, hike sweeping canyons and enjoy live music beneath the stars at the local saloon.But in recent months — as President Trump has announced a 25 percent tariff on certain Canadian goods and threatened the nation’s sovereignty — they and other Canadians are reconsidering their future in Palm Springs. The trend is part of a broader slump in tourism as international travelers say they feel unwelcome in the United States.Two Canadian airlines recently slashed flights to Palm Springs International Airport, citing a drop in demand.Joyce Lee for The New York TimesIn Palm Springs, some are selling or abandoning plans to buy vacation homes. Others are canceling trips or cutting their winter visits short.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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    Russia Claims to Have Retaken Final Village in Its Kursk Region

    Ukraine denied that it had been pushed out of the region and said that its military operations inside Russia were continuing. Russia’s top military commander said on Saturday that Moscow’s forces had retaken the last village that Ukraine was holding in the Kursk region of western Russia, though Ukrainian officials denied that their brazen campaign in the area had finally come to an end.The Russian claim was made by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, who has managed the invasion of Ukraine and defense of Russia as chief of the general staff. His statement came six weeks after his forces retook all but a tiny sliver of the Russian territory that Ukraine had been holding since a surprise offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region last summer.In a televised video, General Gerasimov reported to President Vladimir V. Putin that Russian forces had on Saturday recaptured the village of Gornal, on the border with Ukraine. Speaking to Mr. Putin via a video link, General Gerasimov said that the advance had “completed the defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces that attacked the Kursk region.”The Ukrainian General Staff denied that its forces had withdrawn fully from the region, saying the country’s military operation there was ongoing.“The operational situation is difficult, but our units continue to hold their positions,” the General Staff said in a statement.The expulsion of Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region could remove one of the major complications vexing the peace talks pushed by President Trump, whose special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Mr. Putin for more than three hours in Moscow on Friday to discuss a deal that could end the conflict.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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    This Is Not the America My Immigrant Father Was Determined to Reach

    As the Trump administration disappears immigrants into foreign prisons and sees this as a source of American strength, I think back to when my dad was disappeared, why he came to America and, indeed, why I exist.My dad’s journey through war and concentration camps teaches me that authoritarianism does not strengthen a nation and that, notwithstanding Elon Musk’s warning that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” it has been one of our national strengths — and that because of our president, it is now in peril.My father’s family was Armenian. During World War II, my family members were living throughout Eastern Europe and were secretly involved in a network that was spying on the Nazis and transmitting information to the West. The Gestapo uncovered the network, and my dad’s heroic cousin Izabela was arrested in Poland in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, along with her daughter, Teresa. Izabela died in Auschwitz, and Teresa was subjected to medical experiments by the Nazis.My father and other immediate family members were arrested as well for being part of the spy network. But they were detained in Romania, where officials and the police — the “deep state” — shielded them from the Gestapo, so they were imprisoned for a time but survived and were eventually released. (Bribery helped.)Izabela’s son-in-law, Boguslaw Horodynski, a Pole, oversaw the spy network and survived the war. But the Soviets, seeing a freedom fighter as a potential threat to the emerging Communist bloc, arrested him and dispatched him to a labor camp in the Siberian gulag. We believe Boguslaw was enslaved in a mine in Kolyma — which the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the “pole of cold and cruelty.”Romania’s prime minister personally asked Stalin to show mercy. But Stalin wouldn’t budge.Perhaps this is the prism through which Stalin saw Boguslaw: He’s an immigrant in Romania, he’s potentially a risk to national security, and due process is a silly concept that would slow us down, so we’re sending him to a prison in another country.

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    Massive Iran Port Explosion Kills 4 and Injures Hundreds

    There was no immediate indication that the blast was caused by sabotage or a deliberate attack. State media said it was likely caused by containers of chemicals catching fire.A massive explosion on Saturday at the Iranian port of Shahid Rajaee in Bandar Abbas killed several people and injured hundreds, according to state media. The exact cause of the blast was not immediately clear, although there was no suggestion of an attack or sabotage.Mohammad Rasoul Moradi/Islamic Republic News AgencyA massive explosion at a port in southern Iran on Saturday killed at least four people and injured more than 500, according to state media.The exact cause of the blast at the Shahid Rajaee port in the city of Bandar Abbas was not immediately clear. But Iranian authorities did not suggest it was sabotage or a deliberate attack.The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency quoted an official as saying the ignition of containers of chemicals most likely set off the explosion. The blast sent up clouds of black smoke, according to footage from the scene distributed by an Iranian broadcaster and video from social media that was verified by The New York Times.Bandar Abbas is strategically located along the Strait of Hormuz, a busy Persian Gulf shipping lane for the world’s oil and natural gas.In 2020, Israel launched a cyberattack that hampered operations at the Shahid Rajaee port as part of its long-running shadow war with Iran.Israeli officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday’s explosion.The explosion came around the time that American and Iranian officials began meeting in the Gulf sultanate of Oman on Saturday for a third round of talks on Iran’s nuclear program.Last week, The New York Times reported that Israel had planned to attack Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month, but it was waved off by Mr. Trump, who wanted to negotiate an agreement with Tehran instead. But Mr. Trump has also vowed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, including by military action if necessary. More