Aurelia Butler

Transit leaders proposed a plan on Wednesday to spend more than $65 billion to upgrade New York City’s subway and bus system. Whether they will be able to fully fund it is unclear.Transit leaders on Wednesday released an ambitious five-year plan to upgrade New York City’s subway and bus network, unveiling a $65 billion wish list of projects that includes buying new subway cars, fixing century-old tunnels and installing new elevators.But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the city’s mass transit network, only has about half of the money it needs to pay for those repairs. It was the first spending plan released by the authority since Gov. Kathy Hochul halted a congestion pricing program in June that had been set to begin later that month, and the largely unfunded plan puts the authority in an even more precarious financial position.The congestion pricing program, which would have tolled most drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan, had been projected to raise $15 billion for the authority. Ms. Hochul has pledged to make up the shortfall but it is not clear how she plans to do so.The authority had been enjoying a rare period of prosperity before Ms. Hochul’s decision to suspend congestion pricing. For the first time in decades, it had as much money as it needed, even while transit agencies around the country had struggled to recoup pandemic-related losses. But now that the authority’s projected windfall has evaporated, at least temporarily, it is back in the familiar position of needing to compete with other state interests to fill its coffers.The authority’s goals and upgrades were detailed in its latest capital plan, which covers the period from 2025 through 2029. Released every five years, it is the transit system’s most granular analysis of future maintenance needs and potential expansion projects.About half of the $65 billion has already been funded through bonds, federal grants and direct appropriations from the city and state, leaving the rest in limbo. Because the authority is controlled by the state, the remaining funds would most likely have to come from Albany.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 crash of the Dali into the Francis Scott Key Bridge killed six people. The federal government says the owner and the operator were “grossly negligent” and “reckless.”The U.S. Justice Department filed a legal claim on Wednesday against the owner and operator of the container ship that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, killing six workers and paralyzing the Port of Baltimore for weeks.The lawsuit asserts that the companies’ actions leading up to the catastrophe were “outrageous, grossly negligent, willful, wanton, and reckless.”The government is seeking more than $100 million in damages to cover the costs of the sprawling emergency response to the disaster and the federal aid to port employees who were put out of work. “Those costs should be borne by the shipowner and operator, not the American taxpayer,” said Benjamin Mizer, a deputy associate attorney general who is in charge of the Justice Department’s civil division. He added that the department would be seeking punitive damages as well, “to try to keep this type of conduct from ever happening again.” The action on Wednesday did not name an amount for the punitive damages the department was seeking.Filed in federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department’s action lays out in detail what investigators have learned about the ship’s short and catastrophic journey that night, describing a cascade of failures onboard and multiple points when the disaster could have been prevented.Because of poor maintenance or “jury-rigged” fixes to serious problems aboard the ship, known as the Dali, “none of the four means available to help control the Dali — her propeller, rudder, anchor, or bow thruster — worked when they were needed to avert or even mitigate this disaster,” the suit asserts.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 his fiction and journalism, he sought to illustrate the story of the contemporary Middle East and his native Lebanon.Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer whose sweeping, intricately rendered tales of postwar life in the Middle East won him praise as one of the greatest modern Arabic novelists, and whose editorial leadership of some of Lebanon’s leading publications made him an arbiter of his country’s turbulent political culture, died on Sunday in Beirut. He was 76.His daughter, Abla Khoury, confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that her father had been in declining health for several months.Mr. Khoury’s writing, both fiction and journalism, often focused on the twin events that defined his world: the Lebanese civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the plight of Palestinians after the founding of Israel, particularly the tens of thousands who fled to Lebanon in 1948 and after the Six-Day War of 1967.As a novelist, Mr. Khoury was often compared with the American writer James A. Michener, who in books like “Hawaii” (1959) and “Texas” (1985) attempted to capture epic swaths of history in an intimate narrative.But if his vision was Michenerian, his prose was Faulknerian, driven by interweaving, stream-of-conscious narratives. He also claimed Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino as influences.Mr. Khoury in 2014. His novels often began with a single, sustained encounter before spinning outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders.Bilal Hussein/Associated PressWe 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

There have been more than 230 school shootings in the United States over the past decade and active shooter drills have become routine in students’ lives. Now, technologies developed to protect soldiers in war are being incorporated into everyday objects of childhood school days. At a recent educational trade show, a booth displaying backpacks with removable ballistic shields — riddled with bullet marks from testing — was set between booths for the textbook company McGraw Hill and the learning toy Speak & Spell. Some of these products come from major brands like 3M; others are designed by entrepreneurial parents. One thing they all have in common: they’re expensive ($185 for a pencil case, $450 for a bulletproof hoodie, $60,000 for a classroom shelter). Despite advertisements that tout official protection ratings by the National Institute of Justice, a federal agency, the institute declared such claims “false” and said that it has never tested nor certified any bullet-resistant items except body armor for law enforcement. “School security measures and so-called ‘target hardening’ are extraordinarily expensive and so far, there is not scientific evidence that they make schools safer,” said Dewey Cornell, an expert in classroom safety at the University of Virginia who has trained threat assessment teams in thousands of schools. Steve Naremore, owner of the ballistic shield company TuffyPacks, acknowledged that it was a “morbid industry.” He said that he sold tens of thousands of products to parents within a week of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re just profiting off the carnage,’ ” he said. “And you know what I say? ‘Look, don’t blame me. I’m just the fire extinguisher manufacturer, OK?’” One common marketing tactic is to emphasize kid-friendly aesthetics — whimsical colors, patterns and adorable characters. More

The society fixture, decorator and philanthropist Mica Ertegun helped define the tastes of an era. Now her great collections are going on the block.On a steamy afternoon last week, a team of movers from Christie’s padded quietly about a townhouse on a side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, yanking strips of packing tape from spools as they began bundling up thousands of artworks and objects for auction. The ripping sound the tape made resembled, in a way, screams of protest.“Can’t we get them to stop?” asked Linda Wachner, an American businesswoman and friend of Mica Ertegun, the woman whose house, until her death in December at 97, this was. “At least for a while.”There was a time in the recent social history of New York City when there would have been no necessity to pose the question “Who is Mica Ertegun?” Readers of the tabloid gossip pages, and almost anyone from a certain social stratum, would have known the name of the woman whose New York Times obituary tidily characterized her as “a doyenne of interior design”; wife of a man, Ahmet Ertegun, whom The New Yorker once called “the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World”; a successful decorator named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 Hall of Fame; a celebrated hostess and designated leader of fashion whose dresses were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.This, of course, was an analogue era. We don’t live there anymore.We inhabit instead a world in which taste is less developed over a lifetime than acquired overnight through Pinterest boards; a time when the megarich buy trophy art as a form of asset class; when the oxymoron known as “quiet luxury” noisily announces itself in the form of branded clothing or else in houses appointed with arrangements of costly if blandly generic objects approved by arbiters at Goop.From the Reagans to Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun knew seemingly everyone.Winnie Au for The New York TimesThousands of objects from the Erteguns’ collections will fall to the hammer in late fall.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOurs is a sphere galaxies away from the one Ms. Ertegun knew, and, to a certain degree, helped conjure into being. And so the opportunity was not to be missed when, for several hours, this reporter and a photographer were given relatively free rein to wander the paired townhouses the Erteguns inhabited for decades (one for the use of Ms. Ertegun’s successful decorating business, MAC II, founded in 1969 with her partner, Chessy Rayner). We were left to prowl among collections that by day’s end would be wrapped, bundled and carted away, never again to be arranged in that particular manner.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

Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of the Kind snack company, began appearing as a guest on “Shark Tank” five years ago. Soon he’ll have a permanent seat.As Mark Cuban prepares to leave the ABC hit “Shark Tank” after more than a decade, the reality show is giving the guest star Daniel Lubetzky a permanent seat on the five-person panel. The show, which has aired since 2009, introduces well-connected investors, like Lubetzky, to ambitious entrepreneurs who hope to strike a deal.Lubetzky, who founded Kind Snacks, signed a multi-season deal, and his presence will bring a new dynamic when the next season airs on Oct. 18. This is the first time since 2012 that the show has introduced a regular investor — known as a shark — to its rotating panel, which also includes Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin O’Leary.“We’re seeing it as an inflection point, as an opportunity to grow,” Clay Newbill, the executive director of “Shark Tank,” said in a video interview.Lubetzky started appearing on the show five years ago, often attracting founders of food companies. During negotiations, Lubetzky often smiles and asks entrepreneurs for their back stories. In the process he shares his own. Before he declines to fund someone’s company, he offers advice and shares stories of his own rejections and business miscalculations. He often invokes his father, a Holocaust survivor, when talking about resiliency.Lubetzky complements the show’s themes around the American dream and enchantment with entrepreneurship. He was born in Mexico, and as a child watched his father run businesses. When he was a teenager, the family moved to the United States, and in 2004, after starting other businesses, he began his Kind brand, which emphasizes that its snacks lack artificial flavors and preservatives. A deal with Starbucks in 2009 helped the brand reach even more customers. In 2020, Mars, the maker of M&M’s and Snickers, acquired Kind and valued the company at about $5 billion.Lubetzky says he sees himself as a team player as he joins the show permanently.“So many kids and families watch this show together,” Lubetzky said in an interview in June on the set of “Shark Tank” in Los Angeles, adding that the show is a way for viewers to learn about entrepreneurship. “It’s just an incredible way to contribute.”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

Introducing former President Donald J. Trump at a town-hall event in Michigan on Tuesday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas extolled the virtue of humility in politics with an amusing story: She once teared up while watching her daughter get ready for a father-daughter dance, and her daughter said, “It’s OK, Mommy, one day you can be pretty too.”“So my kids keep me humble,” Ms. Sanders said. Then, mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’s name, she added, “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”The comment was widely interpreted as a reference to Ms. Harris not having biological children; she has two stepchildren. Coming from a surrogate for a campaign whose vice-presidential nominee, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, has been criticized for his past description of Democratic leadership as “childless cat ladies,” Ms. Sanders’s remark quickly prompted bipartisan backlash, including from Bryan Lanza, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.Mr. Lanza said on CNN that the remark was “actually offensive” and that he was “disappointed in Sarah.”Several Democratic-aligned groups highlighted the remark on social media, including the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, Young Democrats of America and Republican Voters Against Trump. So did TV commentators.“Whoa,” Mika Brzezinski said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday. “What is their obsession with women without children of their biological connection?” A spokeswoman for Ms. Sanders did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Ms. Harris’s campaign.Kerstin Emhoff — the ex-wife of Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and the mother of Ms. Harris’s stepchildren — defended Ms. Harris.“Cole and Ella keep us inspired to make the world a better place,” she said in a social media post, referring to her children. “I do it through storytelling. Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble.”Mr. Vance has raised eyebrows on the matter of parenting before. In 2021, he said that perhaps parents “should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids,” a suggestion that he later said was a “thought experiment” and not serious.He has also said he wasn’t disparaging women without children, while doubling down on describing Democrats as “anti-family.”His “childless cat ladies” remark has become something of a cultural phenomenon among supporters of Ms. Harris. In one sign of its continuing resonance, Taylor Swift used it to sign off her endorsement of Ms. Harris last week. More

At the touring dance party Broadway Rave, the playlist is all show tunes. But don’t worry, no house remixes of “I Dreamed a Dream” here.Julia Cochrane drove for four hours, to New York from Boston, so she could spend last Saturday night immersed in all things Broadway. But not in Manhattan.Instead, she headed to Huntington, Long Island. There, over 100 people packed into Spotlight at the Paramount, a small bar attached to a concert hall, for a touring dance party called Broadway Rave, at which theater kids turned theater adults dance and sing onstage in between shots of tequila.“People who love this, they just want to come together,” said Cochrane, 22, who attended with her friend Hannah Opisso, 23, a Long Island resident who learned about the dance party via Instagram. “It’s like you’re basically on a Broadway stage, with new friends.”“You see these folks get onstage and have the courage to be up there,” said Ethan Maccoby, whose company presents Broadway Rave.Ye Fan for The New York TimesCochrane and Opisso met as students at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, where Broadway cast albums were their pregame music of choice. Last weekend, Broadway musicals brought them together again, and at one point they took the stage to sing “Meet the Plastics” from the “Mean Girls” musical.Attendees don’t have microphones — this isn’t karaoke — but they are encouraged to rush the stage to sing and dance when their favorite songs come on. And the term “rave” is a misnomer: The playlist is mostly uncut cast album material — though last weekend those theater fans may have caught the remix flair at the beginning of “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats.” Other songs that night included “Out Tonight” (“Rent”), “Popular” (“Wicked”), “Sincerely Me” (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and a few tracks from “Hamilton,” including “The Schuyler Sisters” and “Wait for It.”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