Elections

The presidential candidate of the main opposition party, as well as its powerful founder, were released 10 days before the West African country is set to hold a national election.Two opposition party politicians were released from jail in Senegal on Thursday night, just 10 days before a nationwide election in which one of them is running for president.Hundreds of supporters celebrated in the streets of Dakar after Ousmane Sonko, Senegal’s foremost opposition leader, was freed along with Bassirou Diomaye Faye, his party’s candidate in the election on March 24.“You never gave up even when we were absent. You kept on fighting.” Mr. Faye told supporters in Dakar on Thursday evening. “Today we are ready to join you in the same fight.”The release is the latest in a series of unexpected moves by the incumbent president, Macky Sall, who cited allegations of corruption when he announced last month that he was canceling the election. Facing a backlash, he reversed course and set the election for Sunday, March 24 — just nine days before his term ends.After years of hinting that he might run again, Mr. Sall finally confirmed last July that he would step down after his two terms were up.Senegal, a coastal West African nation of 17 million people, is seen as a bastion of democracy relative to some of its West African neighbors, which are ruled by military juntas following a spate of coups in recent years.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

Time loops in Japan, a seductive interface for agoraphobes and artificial intelligence battles make up this month’s science fiction streaming picks.‘River’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.In this Junta Yamaguchi film, the staff and clients of a quaint Japanese inn find themselves stuck in a short time loop: Every 120 seconds, they all rewind. This premise makes it sound as if Yamaguchi himself is stuck on repeat since his previous feature, “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” (2022), was about a loop of the same length. But “River” — once again made in collaboration with the Kyoto theater company Europe Kikaku and the writer Makoto Ueda — feels very different. The often broad humor is still present, but the new movie also effectively creates a wistful mood that can make it feel as if you’re watching a live-action Studio Ghibli feature. Dominating the ensemble is Riko Fujitani’s Mikoto, a young employee who eventually convinces herself that she may have caused the temporal disturbance. After kicking off as a goofy comedy as we meet all the characters and watch them try to process their situation in exactly two minutes, “River” slides into a bittersweet romance. Even the intervention of a deus ex (tempus) machina to resolve the plot doesn’t spoil the film’s whimsical charm.‘Sight: Extended’Stream it on Tubi.The agoraphobic Patrick (Andrew Riddell) hasn’t left his apartment in over a month, working remotely and ordering delivery food. Stepping outside to pick up a prescription sets off a near-meltdown; an invitation to a high school reunion triggers feelings of inadequacy. So when Patrick is offered a miracle new app called Refresh, he jumps on the opportunity. He finds himself immersed in an enhanced reality in which his field of vision essentially becomes a screen on which prompts are overlaid, as well as bonuses and rewards. He can even buy booster packs for things like X-ray vision. Overnight, his life becomes a video game in which he is a triumphant He-Man instead of a loser. He even wins over his old crush, Emily (Nova Gaver).Daniel Lazo and Eran May-Raz’s “Sight: Extended” suffers from an affliction plaguing many of the free fare streaming on Tubi: The acting is perfunctory at best, so don’t go in expecting Actors Studio fireworks. But the movie makes up for it by offering a scarily convincing version of an interface so seductive and so toxic that surely it must be just a few days away from becoming available in real life.‘Ozma’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.“What if dreams are rehearsals?” Jeff (Ferdy Roberts) ponders. “Rehearsals for experiences that are too strange for us to accept.” You can see why Jeff is questioning the fabric of reality, because he is in a film named after a “hyper-evolved, shape-shifting jellyfish” that talks in unmistakably feminine tones (voice by Eva Magyar).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

A MoMA series shows how the artist pushes the boundaries of cinema in short movies that both delight and baffle.Movies have been around for well over a century, and for roughly half that time, the American filmmaker Ernie Gehr has — playfully, thoughtfully, beautifully — shown us just how far out, in exciting and liberating they can be.Gehr makes moving images that open your mind and pleasurably rearrange your thoughts. His movies tend to be short, have sound and, these days, were shot in digital. By conventional standards not a lot happens; they don’t tell stories per se, even if they say a great deal. What interests Gehr is light, energy, shape, color, rhythm, time, space and the medium’s plasticity. He chops the image up, twirls it around, makes it sing. You could call his work abstract, experimental or avant-garde, but a more fitting description is that it’s just, well, cinematic.A contested, oft-abused word, cinematic can be fuzzy shorthand to describe images that look and move the way we think movies look and move (or should). Gehr challenges such thinking, which is exemplified by one of his most significant early works, “Serene Velocity” (1970), a silent color film that doesn’t have a single soul or any camera moves in it. Instead, partly by changing the focal lengths on a zoom lens, Gehr created an illusion of movement in which a precisely centered shot of a college basement hall becomes a trippy, propulsive, at times eyeball-popping inquiry into film form. He’s still challenging conventions just as trippily.On Friday, the one-week series “Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Francisco Valente, this dynamic sampler includes both newer work and restored rarities that have been arranged into six programs. Gehr, who is 82 and lives in New York, is scheduled to appear at each show. MoMA is a fitting place to check out his movies, which in their formal rigor, aesthetic concerns and sheer visual pow make them ideal counterparts to the abstract and nonfigurative work hanging on the museum’s walls.Gehr started making films in the 1960s after serving in the Army and landing in New York, where he chanced upon the work by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a titan of the art. Although Gehr ended up going in a different artistic direction, he was excited both by Brakhage’s work and by the very idea that he, too, might make movies. In an era in which most of us have a video camera in our back pocket, it is impossible to overstate just how mind-blowing it once was for many aspiring filmmakers to realize that they didn’t need to be in Hollywood or have stars, crews and astronomical budgets.Instead, if a would-be filmmaker like Gehr was lucky enough to be in New York in the 1960s — then an epicenter of off-Hollywood cine-adventurousness — he could even borrow a camera. That’s exactly what Gehr did after he visited the Millennium Film Workshop, which was then run by the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and lent equipment for free. Gehr soon had a camera in hand that used 8-millimeter film (a precursor to Super-8), a cheaper alternative to 16-millimeter. Lightweight and easy to use, these cameras made making movies on your own entirely doable.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 rate of homeownership continues to lag among Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American people, compared with America’s white population.This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here.Every year, the Real Estate section of The New York Times tackles the subject of first-time home buying with all of the disappointments and joys that are associated with finally owning a house.For many Americans, a house is the biggest investment they will ever make. Their home is their biggest asset, paving the path to financial stability and even to generational wealth. But the rate of homeownership continues to lag among Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American people, compared with the country’s white population.As we developed stories that included buying your childhood home and buying while single, we were conscious of the imbalance of homeownership in the United States. In the past, the Real Estate desk has explored racial bias in home appraisals and the discrimination Black real estate agents face.For these most recent stories, Colette Coleman, a freelance reporter who contributes to The New York Times, found an optimistic trend in Latino homeownership. Speaking to the Urban Institute, a think tank, she learned that the homeownership rate among Hispanics increased more than any other demographic group between 2019 and 2022. The think tank estimated that an overwhelming majority of net new homeowners in the next 20 years will be Hispanic.Looking at the current market, Colette dug into a trend among Hispanic households: co-borrowing to afford a mortgage and pooling together resources to pay the mortgage. She talked to Danae Vega, who bought a home with her sister Ashley a year ago in San Bernardino County, Calif. Their whole family, including another sister, three brothers and their parents pitched in.In Las Vegas, Alexandra García and her father, Rosalio, bought a house for their family together, qualifying for a loan after she added her father, who is an auto mechanic, to her credit cards so that he could have an established credit history, they told Colette.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

A storm, believed to be a tornado, ripped through a mobile home community in eastern Indiana. Ohio and Kentucky were also hit.Tornadoes were reported as storms tore through Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio on Thursday, according to news reports.Local officials believe a tornado hit a trailer park in Winchester, in eastern Indiana, according to 13 WTHR, an NBC News affiliate. However, meteorologists said they were still working to confirm that a tornado had touched down there.Tornadoes in the MidwestLocations of tornado sightings or damage reported by trained spotters. More

Mr. Crumbley and his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, who was found guilty on identical charges last month, are the first parents in the country to be directly charged for the deaths caused by their child in a mass shooting.A jury found James Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter late Thursday over his failure to prevent his teenage son from killing four fellow students and wounding seven others in Michigan’s deadliest school shooting.Mr. Crumbley and his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, who was found guilty on identical charges in a separate trial last month, are the first parents in the country to be directly charged for the deaths caused by their child in a mass shooting.Their prosecutions were seen as part of a national effort to hold some parents responsible for enabling deadly violence by their children. In the Crumbleys’ trials, “the prosecution here found a successful playbook,” said Mark D. Chutkow, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor in Michigan.Prosecutors argued that the Crumbleys ignored warning signs about the massacre, painting Ms. Crumbley as a detached and negligent mother, and accusing Mr. Crumbley of failing to secure the gun used in the shooting.“James Crumbley was presented with the easiest, most glaring opportunities to prevent the deaths of these four students,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor in Oakland County, said in closing arguments on Wednesday. “And he did nothing.”Oakland County prosecutors charged the Crumbleys three days after the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting that killed Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14.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 Grinberg adds a themeless grid to his portfolio of New York Times crosswords.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — “Beware the Ides of March,” a soothsayer warned Emperor Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. Sure enough — spoiler alert — Caesar was assassinated on March 15, 44 B.C.Thankfully, there is nothing remotely like that at stake for us this Ides, but Daniel Grinberg’s crossword is still a Friday toughie for those who are not used to the less straightforward nature of late-week puzzles. So beware the Ides, but by all means have fun.Mr. Grinberg incorporated a basket weave of six grid spanners into his 15×15 design, making the solve a bit more challenging but a lot more fun for me. Look at all those great, long entries! The placement forms a kind of frame or skeleton of the grid. The fill is mostly lively, with a nice mix of high-value Scrabble letters, such as J, Z and X. Those letters do not appear frequently in English words, so they are fun to find in a puzzle.This is the kind of crossword that newer solvers may enjoy if they take their time. Fill in the gimmes, take a break and try again. Be patient and keep coming back to the grid. If you’re persistent, you may find Mr. Grinberg’s first themeless puzzle for The New York Times a fun and satisfying brain teaser.Tricky Clues17A. PHILLIS WHEATLEY, who was captured from Africa and enslaved, went on to become a poet who is considered the first American of African descent to publish a book. Her story is moving and fascinating.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

Seven people were killed. The driver, Ronald Britt, is charged with negligent homicide in a crash that killed one of them.A truck driver faces charges including negligent homicide related to his role in a highway crash during a dense “super fog” in Louisiana in October that caused a huge traffic pileup and left seven people dead and dozens injured, the authorities said this week.The man, Ronald Britt of Lafayette, was driving an 80,000-pound vehicle at around 60 m.p.h. on Oct. 23 when, having not slowed down despite the severe weather, he crashed into the car ahead of him on Interstate 55 northwest of New Orleans, the Louisiana State Police said on Tuesday in a news release. The impact killed a 60-year-old man, James Fleming of Missouri, and severely injured his wife, Barbara Fleming, 69, the police said.“It was determined that Britt was operating at a negligent speed, given the driving conditions at the time,” the police said, which led to the death of the man and the injuries sustained by his wife.Poor weather conditions and limited visibility meant vehicles could not safely exit the highway, the police said, causing congestion and “multiple crashes.” Mr. Fleming had managed to stop his vehicle safely, they said, but was “unable to move his vehicle to a safer location off the road.”Louisiana state law requires that drivers maintain a safe speed appropriate for the prevailing driving conditions.Mr. Britt, 61, surrendered to the authorities on Monday and was also charged with negligent injuring, reckless operation and other traffic offenses, the police said. It was not immediately clear whether he had legal representation.In Louisiana, negligent homicide carries a maximum of five years in prison, a $5,000 fine or both.The crash was one of several that day, the authorities said, as an impenetrable mist shrouded the area. Seven people died and 63 were injured in the large traffic pileup, which involved at least 168 vehicles, the police said. They originally reported that eight people had died but later revised that figure, citing “intense fires” that “complicated the identification of victims.” More