Elections

Fans of spooky technology will have much to enjoy in this episode.Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Red Coast’For its second episode in a row, “3 Body Problem” saved the best for last.The year, via flashback, is 1977, and we’re following the continuing adventures of young Ye Wenjie. Decades later, as an older woman played by Rosalind Chao, she’s better known to us as the mother of the late researcher Vera Ye, and thus the woman who passes along her mystery headset to her colleague Jin Cheng.For the moment, however, she’s just a political prisoner turned valued member of a top-secret Chinese government program designed to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. “Valued,” however, is a relative term. Inspired in part by research gleaned from a verboten American source, she’s figured out how to amplify their signal exponentially by bouncing it off the sun, which will effectively turbo-boost it. But the idea is first stolen by one of her colleagues, then shot down by another as insufficiently doctrinaire. Though she takes a chance on aiming their exceedingly polite broadcast at the sun at least once, she and her team have heard nothing back.Until now. The oceanic whoosh of interstellar signals to which she’s been listening without cease for years suddenly shifts into something sharp and deliberate. The computers make it clear that this isn’t some fluke but an actual signal. Then the message comes in:“Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you do not answer. If you respond we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.”Speaking personally, the terror-fueled adrenaline dump that would have ensued after I read that very first “Do not answer” would have reduced me to an insensate lump. But that’s not the kind of person Ye Wenjie is. Accustomed to keeping her true feelings hidden for years, she keeps it together well enough that no one else at the sleepy installation notices anything has happened. Quietly, she aims the transmitter back at the sun for maximum range.“Come,” she types out in reply. “We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”Wenjie has her reasons for this kind of cynicism. The installation is surrounded by endless miles of recklessly cleared forest. The only person besides her who appears to care about this at all is the handsome American environmentalist Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer), who is single-handedly trying to reforest the region. This would come as a surprise to the present-day characters: By 2024, Evans (played as an older man by Jonathan Pryce) is an oil magnate and the world’s foremost purveyor of scientific disinformation.At any rate, the need to build a new installation will force Evans to shut down his Johnny Appleseed operation. Meanwhile, Wenjie’s attempt to find closure over her father’s murder by confronting his killer, an young former Red Guard radical (played by Lan Xiya) whom the revolution has since devoured in turn. (Almost literally: Guards forcibly severed her gangrenous arm at a labor camp.) Despite having been imprisoned and brutalized, the young woman snarls that she’d kill Wenjie’s dad all over again if she could.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

Just weeks before pivotal elections, the authorities have blocked access to several of the Indian National Congress’s main bank accounts, the party said.India’s largest opposition party accused the national authorities on Thursday of paralyzing its political activities by blocking the party’s access to its bank accounts, in what it described as a heavy-handed response to a tax dispute just weeks before a pivotal general election.Officials with the party, the Indian National Congress, said that eight of its 11 main accounts at four banks had been frozen, and that there was no clear indication of when the party would regain access to the money.“We can’t support our workers; we can’t support our candidates,” Rahul Gandhi, an Indian National Congress leader, said at a news conference in New Delhi. “Our leaders can’t fly. Forget flying — they can’t take a train.”“Our ability to fight elections has been damaged,” he said.Campaigning is heating up for a six-week-long election that starts on April 19 and will determine the next prime minister for the world’s most populous democracy. To run election campaigns from the Himalayan mountains to India’s southern shores, political groups spend billions of dollars in what is seen as one of the world’s most expensive elections.Under Indian law, political groups are exempted from paying income taxes on their funding from individuals and corporations, but must declare their income to the tax authorities each year. The current dispute relates to how heavily the Indian National Congress should be penalized for past irregularities.Last month, the country’s Income Tax Department, which is controlled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, froze the Congress party’s accounts on accusations that it had been 45 days late in filing tax returns on its cash contributions for the 2017-18 financial year. The department also took from the party’s bank accounts $2 million of the $16 million that it said was owed in penalties.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

Right after Sept. 11, the United States created a brand-new criminal justice system at Guantánamo Bay. It was a prison and a court designed to deal with the people we had captured whom we suspected of being members of the Taliban or al Qaeda. But to do what we wanted to do at Guantánamo — […] More

Travis John Branson of Washington State was indicted last year for illegally hunting and selling the birds. A co-defendant is still on the run.One of two men accused of shooting 3,600 birds in Montana, including bald and golden eagles, in an illegal “killing spree” pleaded guilty to taking part in a scheme to sell the dead birds on the black market, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.In a plea deal, Travis John Branson, 48, of Washington State, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, two counts of illegally trafficking bald and golden eagles, and one count of violating the Lacey Act, a federal law prohibiting the sale of illegally acquired wildlife, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana said.Mr. Branson faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the conspiracy and Lacey Act charges, prosecutors said.In December, a grand jury indicted Mr. Branson and his co-defendant Simon Paul, 42, of Montana, on 15 counts, most of them for illegal trafficking of eagles. Prosecutors agreed to drop 11 of those counts for Mr. Branson, according to the plea agreement.Mr. Paul, who did not appear at his arraignment, prosecutors said, is still on the run. His sentencing is set for July 31 at the U.S. District Court in Montana, prosecutors said.From January 2015 to March 2021, the two men routinely met on the prairies of the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana to hunt eagles that they would later sell, prosecutors said. Mr. Branson would travel from Washington State to meet Mr. Paul on the reservation, where he lived, prosecutors said.The men sold the eagles’ wings, tails and, on one occasion, a whole eagle, according to the indictment. Prosecutors did not say how much money the men made from sales, noting only that the bird parts were sold for “significant sums of cash.”At one point they devised a hunting strategy in which they set out a deer carcass to lure in the birds, according to the indictment, which also quoted text messages between Mr. Branson and buyers.In one message, Mr. Branson told a buyer that he was “on a killing spree” to stock up on eagle tail feathers. In another, he wrote that he was out “committing felonies,” according to the indictment.He also seemed to acknowledge in a separate message that shipping the birds internationally was illegal, prosecutors said.Mr. Branson’s public defender, Andrew J. Nelson, could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday evening. Messages left at a phone number and sent to an email address listed for Mr. Branson were immediately returned.A lawyer listed in court records for Mr. Paul declined to comment.The killing of bald eagles was seen as particularly flagrant in a country where the bird is the national symbol and was once considered an endangered species.It was unclear how many of the 3,600 birds prosecutors said the men killed were eagles. Clair J. Howard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment. More

Joe Marquez’s theme is about my favorite type of puzzle.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — The following is simply my thoughts about today’s puzzle. As always, your mileage may vary.After solving crosswords for many years, I’ve come to the realization that, even when I come across a puzzle that is perfectly enjoyable, there is probably a similar one I’ve already solved that was — I don’t want to say “better,” just closer to what I had hoped for in today’s theme.That’s the problem with having a lot of grids under one’s belt. You start to compare them. And I try very hard not to do that. Sometimes I fail.Joe Marquez’s theme is tight and impressive, but it’s just not the May 29, 2011, puzzle by Tony Orbach and Jeremy Newton (Here’s the Wordplay column if you’re interested.) It didn’t have exactly the same theme, but the mechanics of Mr. Orbach and Mr. Newton’s crossword were exemplary and turned the solve into something that felt alive. Of course, the 2011 puzzle was a 21×21 Sunday, so there was more room to play around with design. But something like that in Mr. Marquez’s similarly themed puzzle would have really elevated it.Maybe this is just me, but if you’re going to make a puzzle about this topic, and it runs on a Thursday — the day that is more likely to contain a trick than others — I feel as if there should be some sort of interactive feature to solve it.I liked Mr. Marquez’s puzzle, and if I were a new solver I would have been happy with it. But that’s the downside of experience: I have the solving skills, but I also know what’s possible.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 company put on a semi-staged version of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the last minute, after a backstage lift got jammed.The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Turandot” is one of the most lavish and intricate in the company’s repertoire, a spectacle that includes an imperial palace, a glittering throne room and expansive gardens.But on Wednesday evening, audience members had to make do without the opera’s usual visual delights. A jam in the Met’s main lift backstage forced the company to put on a semi-staged version at the last minute, with the cast and chorus singing from an improvised set instead.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, walked onstage before the show to explain the situation.“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to say that this is not going to be a normal night at the opera,” he said. “Although our scenery will not be working, the show will go on.”Audience members were offered a refund if they wished to leave, and about 150 people did, the Met said. But most stayed, offering a hearty applause when the conductor, Oksana Lyniv, entered the pit. (The Met, which has about 3,800 seats, said that the performance’s paid attendance was about 80 percent of capacity before the problem was announced.)Gelb said in an interview that the machinery jammed around 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, while the Met was changing sets for “Turandot” after a rehearsal for Puccini’s “La Rondine,” which opens next week. Crew members tried using saws to cut through steel bars to free the lift, but their efforts were unsuccessful.By about 6:30 p.m., one hour before the show was to begin, Gelb had to make a decision: cancel the show, or move forward with a pared-down version. He said he was reluctant to turn audiences away.“Everybody rallied together,” he said.The Met used a piece of scenery from the second act of “Turandot” — a wall in the imperial palace — as a backdrop, to provide some color. The action was confined to roughly the first 20 feet of the stage.Gelb tried to encourage the singers by telling them that their music would be more powerful, telling the tenor SeokJong Baek that when he sang the famous aria “Nessun dorma,” “you’ll be that much closer the audience.”Technical mishaps have rarely stopped productions at the Met. In 1966, when the Lincoln Center house was opened, a turntable malfunctioned at a dress rehearsal for Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” The soprano Leontyne Price narrowly escaped being trapped inside the pyramid on top of it. And in 2011, a performance of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” was delayed for 45 minutes because of a technical problem with the 45-ton set.Gelb said that he expected things to be back to normal in time for a performance of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” on Thursday.“Tonight as soon as show ends,” he said, “it will be all hands on deck to free this lift.” More

The measure known as Proposition 1, which includes $6.38 billion for treatment and housing, was a top priority for Gov. Gavin Newsom to reduce homelessness in the state.A key piece of California’s strategy to address its homelessness crisis was narrowly approved by voters in the state, The Associated Press determined on Wednesday, in a stunningly close margin that had Democrats on edge for more than two weeks.The measure, known as Proposition 1, includes a $6.4 billion bond to fund treatment and housing for homeless people with severe mental illnesses and addiction. Last year, when Gov. Gavin Newsom and a bipartisan group of California legislators placed Proposition 1 on the spring ballot, early polls suggested that it would pass easily.Its approval was considered such a sure thing that most voters and political donors were scarcely aware that opposition existed. But after the March 5 election, it took 15 days of tallying mail-in ballots for The Associated Press to determine that the measure had squeaked by.The count took so long that Mr. Newsom decided to postpone his annual state of the state address, which was originally scheduled for Monday, because he had wanted to celebrate Proposition 1 during his speech and highlight his efforts on homelessness and mental health.On Wednesday, the governor framed the win less as a close call than a bold choice by Californians who have been frustrated for years with the scale of the state’s homelessness problem. “This is the biggest change in decades in how California tackles homelessness, and a victory for doing things radically different,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “Proposition 1’s passage means we can begin repairing the damage caused by decades of broken promises and political neglect to those suffering from severe mental illness.” 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

Josephine Wright, who died this year at 94, had been fighting to save family property. The developer, Bailey Point Investments, agreed to end the dispute, the family’s lawyer said.The family of a woman who fought a developer to keep their ancestral land in Hilton Head, S.C., has reached a settlement in the legal battle that recognized her ownership, a family lawyer said this week.Josephine Wright, who died in January at 94, had been leading the fight to retain rights to the land that had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War. Her quest had drawn support from celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Kyrie Irving.The company that owns the development neighboring her property, Bailey Point Investment, had sued Ms. Wright in February 2023, claiming encroachment. The company said that her satellite dish, shed and screened porch trespassed on its land, which had “significantly delayed and hindered” development.The two parties had agreed on the terms of a settlement before Ms. Wright died in January, but the documents were not signed, so they had to wait until it was determined who would be authorized to sign on behalf of her estate, Roberts Vaux, the family’s lawyer said in an email.Mr. Vaux declined to provide details of the settlement, but said that the land that Ms. Wright claimed is “confirmed as hers.”A lawyer representing Bailey Point Investment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A family spokeswoman, Altimese Nichole, told South Carolina Public Radio that the settlement requires that Bailey Point Investment stop contacting the family about acquiring the land and that it fix a roof on the property, put up a privacy fence and provide landscaping.Ms. Wright had previously told The New York Times that her husband inherited the 1.8-acre property from his parents, and that it was put in her name after he died in 1998.The property has been a gathering spot for Ms. Wright’s seven children, 40 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren, she had said.Ms. Wright’s predicament, however, wasn’t all that unique among residents of Hilton Head, S.C., an island 100 miles from Charleston, S.C.Land in the area was owned by many Black families who had settled there long before developers arrived in the 1950s and made it a tourist destination, Mel Campbell, 75, a community elder previously told the Times. Many of the Black families were descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and worked on rice, indigo and cotton plantations.Many families were offered large checks from developers for their land, Ms Wright said. She said that she had refused when she was offered $39,000 for the land years ago.Ms. Wright told The Times in August that the land’s value was not only monetary. “It’s a family thing,” she said then, “and we want to keep it that way forever.” More