Elections

The Weather Prediction Center issued a rare “high risk” prediction of excessive rain for parts of Southern California, saying eight inches could fall.Parts of Southwest California on Sunday braced for heavy rains — potentially as much as an inch an hour — that could lead to life-threatening floods and “one of the most dramatic weather days in recent memory,” forecasters said.An intensifying coastal storm will strengthen an atmospheric river that will stream warm tropical moisture into California. Rare forecasts have been issued for life-threatening flooding, hurricane-force winds, waterspouts, tornadoes and heavy snowfall across California from Sunday into Monday.“This major storm will bring a multitude of dangerous weather conditions to the area,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles said on Sunday morning.The Weather Prediction Center issued a rare “high risk” prediction of excessive rain in an area that includes Santa Barbara, Ventura and Oxnard, saying eight or more inches of rain could fall in a 24-hour period.Over the past decade, some of the deadliest and most destructive floods have occurred in areas that forecasters said were at this level of risk, which is a category they rarely use.About half the time a high risk is issued, there is at least one fatality or injury, and about two out of every three times, there is at least $1 million in damage, according to data from the Weather Prediction Center.

Possibility of excessive rain Sunday More

“What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.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

Hatred makes people gullible and foolish. That’s a key lesson of the MAGA right’s deeply strange turn against Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs’ star tight end Travis Kelce. In fact, that’s a key lesson from this entire sorry era in American political and cultural life.There’s nothing new about partisan anger at celebrities. And Swift has dabbled in politics. In 2018, she endorsed the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, over Republican Marsha Blackburn, and in 2020 she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Kelce, for his part, appeared in ads for the Pfizer Covid vaccine. By MAGA’s calculation, between them the couple express the most infernal combination of affiliations — Democrats and vaccines.Moreover, “shut up and sing” (or, in Kelce’s case, shut up and catch) has been such a consistent theme in right-wing cancel culture that it was the title both of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s 2003 book and of a 2006 documentary about the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks). But Republican opposition to celebrity engagement has always been highly selective. Even as he condemned Swift, one prominent MAGA figure recently boasted that his “side” still had Kid Rock, Ted Nugent and Jon Voight. And it was the G.O.P., after all, that elected both a movie star (Ronald Reagan) and a reality TV celebrity (Donald Trump) to the presidency.But while traditional partisan pettiness can explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to Swift, it can’t come close to explaining the incredible weirdness of the recent theory emanating from people with some of the largest platforms in MAGA America. According to them, Taylor Swift’s extraordinary popularity isn’t the organic outcome of a talented and appealing superstar’s bond with her fans. No, according to them, Swift’s rise is an “op” or a “psyop” engineered by the deep state in order to benefit Joe Biden.A central part of the plot, of course, is Swift’s fake, deep-state-invented relationship with Kelce. Thus when the Chiefs struggled earlier in the season, it was a source of right-wing schadenfreude. But now that they’ve surged into a berth in the Super Bowl, it has all been revealed as part of The Plan.Again, it’s all just so dumb and strange. But dumb and strange is par for the course with MAGA. If we imagined conspiracy theories as movies, we’d say “Taylor Swift: Psyop” was brought to you by the same studio that produced cult classics such as “Pizzagate” and “The Seth Rich Conspiracy,” not to mention the tentpole franchises “QAnon” and “Stop the Steal.”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

Phyllis Chen began studying the piano at age 5, learning from a strict, traditional teacher who taught her the standard repertoire. She was a passionate musician, but sometimes wondered how much of her playing was artistic, rather than purely athletic.“I never found it to be entirely fulfilling,” Chen said in a video interview. “I always thought there was something missing.”Chen, 45, was pursuing graduate studies at Indiana University when she first encountered the toy piano, an instrument with a brittle, xylophone-like sound usually around 20 inches long, with a range of three octaves. Her teacher, the virtuoso pianist André Watts, was a Liszt specialist but encouraged her to pursue her own interests.Once, Watts tried Chen’s toy piano; the keys were so small and his hands so big that he struggled to play a single note at a time. But for her, playing the unusual instrument was liberating. “I was very excited to be able to explore without all of the traditional boundaries being tied to it,” she said. “No one was going to tell me: ‘This is the canon of works. This is how it needs to be played.’”She is among the growing number of keyboardists expanding their practice beyond the modern piano — that instrument so central to classical music, with its large and historically important repertoire, orchestral heft and essential role in teaching. But for these pianists, learning to play other keyboards has been invigorating. On these less prominent instruments, they have explored unfamiliar timbral terrain, re-examined their approaches to canonical works and created new repertoire. They return to the modern piano with greater aural and tactile sensitivity, feeling a renewed sense of freedom and purpose at the instrument.Chen was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001. A few years later, she was extremely busy, traveling between New York and Chicago to perform and attending university in Bloomington, Ind., when she got tendinitis in both arms.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 United States has led a major wave of retaliatory strikes in the Middle East, hitting scores of targets belonging to Iranian-backed armed groups since Friday. The strikes are a sharp escalation of hostilities in the region, one that President Biden had sought to avoid since the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza began in October.Here is how the latest strikes have unfolded.Jan. 28: Three U.S. service members were killed and dozens of others were injured in a drone attack on their remote military outpost in Jordan, the Pentagon said. They were the first known American military fatalities from hostile fire in the Middle East since October, when regional tensions rose with the start of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.The Biden administration said the drone had been launched by an Iran-backed militia from Iraq, and Mr. Biden pledged to respond. The U.S. has blamed Iranian-backed armed groups for launching more than 150 attacks since October on U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East.Jan. 30: Mr. Biden said he had decided on a response to the attack in Jordan, but did not say what it would be. Some Republican lawmakers called for a direct strike against Iran, but Mr. Biden’s advisers said he was determined to avoid a wider regional conflict.Friday: The United States carried out airstrikes on more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq, aiming at Iranian-backed forces including the group it said was responsible for the Jordan strike. The Pentagon said the strikes targeted command and control operations, intelligence centers, weapons facilities and bunkers used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.Afterward, U.S. officials said that Mr. Biden had not seriously considered striking inside Iran, and that by targeting facilities used by the powerful Quds Force, while not trying to take out its leadership, the United States sought to signal that it did not want all-out war.Saturday: American and British warplanes, with support from six allies, launched strikes at dozens of sites in Yemen controlled by Houthi militants. A joint statement from the allies said that the targets included weapons storage facilities, missile launchers, air defense systems and radars, and that the strikes were intended to deter the Houthis’ attacks on Red Sea shipping.Sunday: Shortly after the Houthis said they would respond to the U.S. and British strikes, American forces said they had carried out another attack on the group, destroying a cruise missile that had posed “an imminent threat to U.S. Navy ships and merchant vessels in the region.” More

Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyOf all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected]. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at [email protected] production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

Ayo Edebiri hosted in a show that focused much of its energy on politics, along with Taylor Swift conspiracy theories and a “Dune” popcorn bucket.“Saturday Night Live” resumed its election-season tradition of bringing on political candidates to play themselves, inviting Nikki Haley for a cameo in its opening sketches this weekend.Haley, who has tried to make use of comedy and popular culture as she trails former President Donald J. Trump in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, appeared in a segment that was presented as a CNN town hall event with Trump (played by the show’s resident Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson).Johnson fielded questions from other “S.N.L.” cast members, explaining how he planned to beat President Biden and would “stop Taylor Swift from infiltrating the Super Bowl.” The town hall moderators then introduced a question from an audience member “who describes herself as a concerned South Carolina voter.”That voter turned out to be Haley, the former governor of South Carolina (as well as an ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration). “Yes, hello,” Haley said to Johnson. “My question is, why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?”“Oh my God, it’s her!” Johnson said. “The woman who was in charge of security on Jan. 6. It’s Nancy Pelosi.”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

Este domingo, Nayib Bukele se dispone a reelegirse con facilidad. Sus medidas enérgicas contra las pandillas, a costa de la restricción de las libertades civiles, le han acarreado un enorme apoyo.En las elecciones presidenciales de El Salvador de este domingo, no hay una verdadera competencia: se espera que Nayib Bukele, el presidente milénial que reconfiguró el país con una serie de medidas enérgicas contra las pandillas y las libertades civiles, gane la reelección de forma aplastante.Los juristas afirman que Bukele, de 42 años, está violando una prohibición constitucional al buscar un segundo mandato consecutivo, algo que a la mayoría de los salvadoreños parece no importarle.Las encuestas muestran que los electores apoyan de manera abrumadora la candidatura de Bukele y que probablemente consolidarán la supermayoría de su partido en la Asamblea Legislativa el domingo, lo que extendería el control irrestricto del presidente sobre cada rama del gobierno durante años.“Quieren demostrar que pueden hacerlo, que tienen el apoyo popular para hacerlo, y quieren que todos simplemente se resignen a ello, sin importar lo que diga la Constitución”, afirmó Ricardo Zuniga, que fungió como enviado especial del Departamento de Estado de EE. UU. a Centroamérica durante la presidencia de Biden. “Es una demostración de poder”.Casi el 80 por ciento de los salvadoreños afirmó en una encuesta reciente que apoyaba la candidatura de Bukele. La misma encuesta reveló que su partido, Nuevas Ideas, podría obtener hasta 57 de los 60 escaños de la Asamblea Legislativa, después de que se realizaron cambios en la composición del órgano legislativo que, según los analistas, beneficiaron al partido de gobierno.El argumento más fuerte de la candidatura de Bukele ha sido los casi dos años de estado de excepción que su gobierno impuso luego de que las pandillas criminales que hacía mucho tiempo dominaban las calles cometieron una ola de asesinatos en marzo de 2022.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