Aurelia Butler

Ariel Lopez and his wife, Tiffany, thought Helene would be like Hurricane Idalia, which brought about four inches of storm surge into their home in Shore Acres, a flood-prone neighborhood of St. Petersburg.“We figured, we can handle that,” Ms. Lopez said. “But it turned out to be four feet.”The couple and their four children who live with them had prepared for the storm, putting up water barriers and buying two paddle boards that they could perhaps use to evacuate in a worst-case scenario.On Thursday night, as the storm first approached, it was eerily quiet. Then, suddenly, the water began to rise — two feet in an hour. They feared it would rise to the roof, and made a decision to swim out to safety.Outside, the water was chest-high, dark and moving fast. A few times, they both thought they would die. But they were reluctant to frame their flight as a story of heroics and survival. “I’m not going to say it was one of those things we tackled, like, ‘We got this,’” Mr. Lopez said. “The water was cold.”One of their sons worried that they would all get hypothermia.Finally, they made it to safety at a friend’s house on higher ground, one street over. Almost immediately, they turned around and went back to fetch their five pets, using the paddle boards to ferry them back.Even in the safety of their neighbor’s house, though, there were no celebrations.“We had a family disagreement at like 1 a.m.,” Ms. Lopez said, when their daughter asked why, after so many storms, they had chosen to stay.They didn’t have a good answer. After this experience, the couple said, they have decided to move inland, to higher ground. There, at least, if a hurricane comes, they only have wind, downed trees and power outages to contend with — not a terrifying surge of seawater.“I think this was the final straw,” Mr. Lopez said. More

The Israeli prime minister castigated Israel’s critics and the United Nations itself during his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly.When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel arrived in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, he seemed to be entering a lion’s den.Speaker after speaker at the annual gathering of world leaders had portrayed Israel as a global villain. Police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who called Mr. Netanyahu a war criminal. His public rebuttal of a Biden administration plan to pause the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raised tensions between the two governments.But Mr. Netanyahu bulldozed his way through his visit, castigating Israel’s critics and the United Nations itself, offering no diplomatic concessions, and ordering an airstrike in Beirut that may have killed Israel’s long hunted archnemesis, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.The strike landed even as Mr. Netanyahu delivered defiant remarks to a U.N. General Assembly hall — largely emptied after dozens of diplomats walked out in protest — in which he triumphantly declared of Israel’s multiple conflicts: “We are winning.”It is an assessment some U.S. officials say could reflect short-term truth while skirting past the risk of a larger conflict that could be devastating for all involved.Hours later, senior Israeli officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation, expressed remarkable confidence about their military and sabotage campaign against Hezbollah. Their blows against the group over the past two weeks and Mr. Nasrallah’s possible death could be a turning point, they said, in their ongoing struggle with Iran, which arms and funds Hezbollah, Hamas and other proxy forces in what the officials portrayed as a plan to destroy Israel.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

He uses showdowns with reporters to cast himself as a pugnacious, unscripted defender of Donald J. Trump.“We’re a little behind on time, so I won’t take as many questions as I normally do,” the senator from Ohio said, before casually inviting local reporters to ask him whatever they’d like. “If you’ve got a microphone, just shout a question and I’ll answer it.”Usually, when candidates on the campaign trail take questions from the press, they do so before or after their events, far from the crowd. Vance holds gaggles like that, but he has also developed an unusual routine that has swiftly become a trademark of his campaign events: He has taken to parrying reporters’ questions in front of his voters — turning journalists into set pieces in a performance where he casts himself as former President Donald Trump’s pugnacious, unscripted defender while his raucous supporters tilt the playing field in his favor.That night, as Nick Ochsner, a reporter with the local broadcaster WBTV, began to speak — “I want to ask you about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson,” he said, referring to the state’s embattled Republican candidate for governor — the crowd began to boo, drowning out Ochsner, who implored Vance’s supporters to let him finish. With a theatrical cough, Vance turned to the people behind him, well aware that they would share his exasperation.“I knew I’d get this,” Vance said, throwing one hand up with the air of a parent allowing a troublesome child to have his say, instead of a candidate for vice president answering a reasonable question.Ochsner pressed on, pointing out that Robinson, a Trump-endorsed candidate who campaigned alongside both Trump and Vance in happier times, wasn’t by Vance’s side after CNN reported that Robinson made lewd and racist comments on a pornography website.“Is there something disqualifying about the comments uncovered by CNN that wasn’t disqualifying about any of the previous comments he made?” Ochsner asked, as the crowd jeered some more.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

As Senator JD Vance of Ohio prepares for the vice-presidential debate next week, several past statements — including a private message in which he reportedly criticized former President Donald J. Trump near the end of his term and a video of him linking car-seat regulations to low birthrates — came back to haunt him on Friday.Long before he became Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance had a well-known history of criticizing Mr. Trump, who he once said he feared could be “America’s Hitler.” But Mr. Vance later became a supporter and ally of Mr. Trump’s, attributing his change of heart to his appreciation of Mr. Trump’s presidency.The senator’s explanation came under scrutiny on Friday after The Washington Post reported that he had said in a private message on social media in February 2020 that Mr. Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism.”Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said in a statement that it was “hard to conceive of a more scathing and definitive rejection” of Mr. Trump.The Trump campaign responded to the messages reported by The Post by noting that Mr. Vance had voted for Mr. Trump for re-election in 2020. The campaign did not dispute the accuracy or the existence of the messages, attributing them to an exchange with a consultant. (The Post did not identify the recipient.)William Martin, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, said in a statement that “it’s no secret” that Mr. Vance had been a “critic of President Trump in the past.” He said that Mr. Vance’s criticism was not directed at Mr. Trump, but at “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda.”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

In “Downton Abbey,” “A Room With a View” and dozens of other films and television series, she delighted audiences with her portrayal of sharp, tart-tongued and often wryly funny Englishwomen.Maggie Smith, who was 89 when she died on Friday, made her professional stage debut on Broadway in the 1950s, when she was still in her early 20s. In the decades that followed, she worked steadily in movies and television, while regularly returning to the theater.Smith won her first Oscar for the title role in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), a charismatic and manipulative teacher who has a profound and, at times, destructive effect on the lives of the teenage girls in her charge. She went on to win another Oscar, a Tony and four Emmys, and became known in her later years for playing a particular type of Englishwoman: sturdy, smart, sharp-tongued and rooted sometimes stubbornly in the traditions of the past.Audiences in the 21st century came to love Smith in two recurring roles: as the heroic Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies and as the coolly disapproving Dowager Countess Violet Crawley in the period TV drama “Downton Abbey.” But her career was long and eclectic, with a mix of serious and comic characters, in both supporting and leading roles. Here are 10 of Smith’s best performances that are available to stream:1972‘Travels With My Aunt’Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Though she was only in her late 30s at the time, Smith took an early step toward her most familiar screen persona — the dynamic and unforgettable older relative — in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s offbeat adventure novel. Filling in for Katharine Hepburn (who differed with the studio and with her old friend, the director George Cukor, on how best to tell her character’s story), Smith ended up nabbing her third Oscar nomination, playing the eccentric globe-trotter Augusta Bertram, who enlists a stuffy, middle-aged Londoner in one of her illicit moneymaking schemes while hiding her true connection to him. Smith builds an outsize yet complex character via flashbacks that show how she learned to eschew conventional mores and to enjoy life on her own terms.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 tech giant, which wrapped up its arguments in the federal monopoly trial, simply says it has the best product.Over the past week, Google has called more than a dozen witnesses to defend itself against claims by the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general that it has a monopoly in advertising software that places ads on web pages, part of a second major federal antitrust trial against the tech giant.Google’s lawyers wrapped up their arguments in the case on Friday, and the government will now offer a rebuttal. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is presiding over the nonjury trial, is expected to deliver a ruling by the end of the year, after both sides summarize their cases in writing and deliver closing arguments.The government last week concluded its main arguments in the case, U.S. et al. v. Google, which was filed last year and accuses Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites around the internet.The company’s defense has centered on how its actions were justified and how it helped publishers, advertisers and competition. Here are Google’s main arguments.How Google claims its actions were justifiedThe Justice Department and a group of states have accused the tech company of abusing control of its ad technology and violating antitrust law, in part through its 2008 acquisition of the advertising software company DoubleClick. Google has pushed up ad prices and harmed publishers by taking a big cut of each sale, the government argued.But Google’s lawyers countered that the ad tech industry was intensely competitive. They also accused the Justice Department of ignoring rivals like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon to make its case sound more compelling.Visa, Google, JetBlue: A Guide to a New Era of Antitrust ActionBelow are 15 major cases brought by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission since late 2020, as President Biden’s top antitrust enforcers have promised to sue monopolies and block big mergers.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

Punctuation delayed, but not denied: A memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë at Poets’ Corner in the celebrated London church finally gets its accent marks.For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.This week, the error was fixed when six diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about a third of an inch in diameter — were added above the E of the famous last name.It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.“Those three women fought harder than most to have their voices heard, to have their work understood on its own merits, and it endures,” said Sharon Wright, who discovered the mistake while visiting Westminster Abbey in London in January. “We can at least get their names right.”Ms. Wright, who describes herself as a stroppy Yorkshire woman like the literary sisters, was researching her upcoming book “The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar,” when she visited the plaque. Ms. Wright, who also edits the Brontë Society Gazette, a periodical for Brontë fans, compared the plaque with how the women had signed their own names, and saw the discrepancy.“Three of our greatest writers, and their names are spelled incorrectly,” Ms. Wright said at the abbey on Friday. “You can’t make it up.”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

Four insiders on where to stay, eat “micro-seasonal” dishes and shop for handmade pottery and textiles.T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at [email protected] to the northern provinces of Thailand have long been drawn by two things — elephant camps and campy temples. The most famous examples of each are within or near the 13th-century city of Chiang Rai, where the Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, stands as an artist’s parable of the world’s ills, as depicted in the form of pop culture villains and other icons of kitsch. (If crossing a sea of grasping arms at the entrance doesn’t terrify you, beware the Freddy Krueger-themed hanging planters.) Chiang Rai is also where the Emerald Buddha, a national treasure now housed in Bangkok’s Grand Palace, was reportedly discovered in 1434. According to legend, a bolt of lightning cracked the stupa in which it had been hidden years prior.Chiang Rai — the city shares its name with the surrounding province — has gained a reputation as something of a tourist trap, thanks to the tour buses that ferry visitors from the White Temple to the equally gaudy Blue Temple and then to the very bleak Black House (which the artist Thawan Duchanee, who died in 2014, decorated with elephant skulls and antlers and a table runner made of snakeskin). But the city, having played second fiddle to the luxe-boho paradise of Chiang Mai ever since King Mang Rai moved the capital of the Lanna Kingdom — which ruled over most of what is now northern Thailand — to the “new city” in 1296, has more recently emerged as an unhurried haven for serious artists and other creative professionals seeking to escape the heat and sprawl of Bangkok.The third edition of Thailand’s roaming Biennale, which brought dozens of international and Thai artists to Chiang Rai this past winter and spring, shed light on an often-overlooked aspect of the city — its long history as a cultural crossroads. Owing both to its proximity to Laos and Myanmar and, to some degree, the Golden Triangle’s uncomfortable past as a center of the global drug trade, Chiang Rai has been the site of intermingling cultures for centuries.“The constant migration of people of different races and religions make this an interesting place both geographically and culturally,” says the Chiang Rai-born artist and gallerist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. In 2023, Chiang Rai was also recognized by UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for its sustainable architecture design and landscapes. “My house is near the city’s oldest Christian church, close to an Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple off the same road,” says Ajchariyasophon. “This is where I grew up and learned about cultural diversity, which I find wonderful.”Today, multigenerational family-run restaurants featuring traditional Thai, Chinese and Myanmarese specialties likewise share a slow-movement sensibility with hipster cafes that serve coffee from beans grown on local farms, and stylish home stays that incorporate teak wood scavenged from nearby forests. Here, Ajchariyasophon and other Chiang Rai enthusiasts offer their recommendations on where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee in and around the city.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