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      Fan Bingbing, Once China’s Top Actress, Returns to Film Years After Tax Scandal

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      Fan was a megastar until 2018, when she was fined tens of millions of dollars over unpaid taxes and her career tanked. “Green Night” is her first film since the scandal.Fan Bingbing will return to the screen on Friday with the online release of “Green Night,” six years after one of the biggest names in Chinese cinema spectacularly fell from grace over a tax scandal.Fan was at the peak of her career in 2018, with a long list of blockbusters and lucrative deals with luxury brands, when she disappeared for months. She re-emerged in October that year with an apology. The authorities in China fined her the equivalent of almost $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.The scandal halted Fan’s film career in China, the biggest movie market outside the United States. She avoided criminal charges, however, and remained in the public eye as she expanded a beauty product business, Fan Beauty.In her return to film, Fan is the lead in “Green Night,” a film by Han Shuai, a Chinese director, and set in South Korea. It will be available to stream in the United States on Friday after making its debut on the festival circuit in Berlin last year.In “Green Night,” Fan, now 43, plays a Chinese woman who partners with a young South Korean woman to break free from oppression. The film is about “women helping women and women redeeming women,” she said last year at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. “Some of my experiences and some stories in recent years are integrated into the character I present in the movie.”Fan Bingbing, in red, and the South Korean actress Lee Joo-young at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea in October 2023.Lee Jae-hee/Yonhap, via Associated PressFan could not be reached for comment. Speaking about her hiatus, she said at the Busan festival that the break had given her “time to ground” herself.Her downfall was triggered by an accusation online that she was paid millions of dollars more for her work on a film than was reported to the tax authorities. The practice of using two contracts was widespread in many industries in China as a way to avoid taxes, but this accusation prompted a wider investigation into the entertainment business.“I have had deep and profound self-reflection,” Fan wrote in her 2018 apology, posted on the social media platform Weibo. “I feel shamed and guilty for what I have done.”The authorities in China maintain strict control of the media, including entertainment and censor content they deem inappropriate. Movie stars and other prominent figures in the entertainment industry are expected to adhere to the government guidelines.“Green Light” has not been released in mainland China, but many internet users there appeared to be able to watch it through unofficial channels. Douban, a Chinese platform where users can review movies, books and music, indicated Thursday that around 38,000 users had watched the film. More

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      Panel Calls for Secret Service Overhaul in Report on Trump Shooting Attempt

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      The findings of a review of the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump in July are stark but familiar, underscoring the challenge of overhauling the agency.An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.The recommendations, part of a report released on Thursday and commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, outlined deficiencies that had already been identified in the months after the rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. Those include the failure of the Secret Service to secure a nearby building where a would-be assassin stationed on the rooftop fired eight shots toward Mr. Trump. That and other security lapses, members of the panel said, resulted from an absence of “critical thinking” among agents and supervisors.The panel was particularly struck by a “lack of ownership” conveyed by the agents it interviewed. Those involved in the security planning did not take responsibility in the lead-up to the event, nor did they own failures in the aftermath. And, the report added, they “have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions or opportunities for improvement.”The findings are stark — this is the first assessment to bluntly identify failures on the part of senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail. Yet the conclusions are also familiar.A panel convened in 2014 after a man scaled the White House fence and entered the mansion made similar proposals. That the issues persist a decade later underscores the challenge of overhauling an agency with such an entrenched culture.“The service has become insular and stale,” Janet Napolitano, a member of the four-person panel, said in an interview. Ms. Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency, from 2009 to 2013, added, “It is time for the service to kind of break out and to reach out beyond its own agency to bring in talent that can really take a fresh look at what it is they do, and how they do it.” In the past century, the agency has had only one director not promoted from within.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

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      ECB Cuts Interest Rates Again as Eurozone Inflation Slows

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      Policymakers who set interest rates for the 20 countries that use the euro have lowered rates in back-to-back meetings for the first time since 2011.The European Central Bank cut interest rates on Thursday for the third time in about four months, as inflation in the eurozone has cooled faster than expected and economic growth has been sluggish.Policymakers who set interest rates for the 20 countries that use the euro lowered their key rate by a quarter point, to 3.25 percent. Thursday’s decision came just five weeks after a cut at the bank’s previous meeting, and on a day that a report showed the eurozone’s inflation rate slowing to 1.7 percent in September, falling below the bank’s 2 percent target for the first time in more than three years.“The disinflationary process is well on track,” Christine Lagarde, the president of the central bank, said at a news conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.The rate move was also influenced by weaker-than-expected economic data in the past few weeks. Whether it was the inflation data or surveys of economic activity, “it is the same story,” she said: “It’s all heading in the same direction — downwards.”After years of trying to force inflation down with high interest rates, central bankers around the world are walking a tightrope as they consider how quickly to cut interest rates. Lowering rates too fast could reignite simmering inflationary pressures, but keeping rates too high for too long risks slowing the economy substantially and inflation becoming too weak.In recent weeks, policymakers have suggested that rate cuts could be more aggressive as inflation has slowed significantly and economic growth has been lackluster. Last month, the U.S. Federal Reserve cut rates by a half-point, paving the way for quicker or bigger rate cuts in Europe, analysts said. On Wednesday, traders increased their bets that the Bank of England would pick up the pace of its rate cuts after data showed inflation in Britain fell to 1.7 percent in September, below the bank’s 2 percent target.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

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      Zelensky Outlines Ukraine’s ‘Victory Plan’ to EU Leaders

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made an urgent plea in Brussels, though it’s unclear to what extent the officials gathered there will go along with it.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states in Brussels on Thursday that his country desperately needed their support for his plan to end the war, which he maintains could happen no later than next year, but which it is unclear how much Ukraine’s allies will embrace.Mr. Zelensky made the impassioned plea on his latest trip abroad as he tries to attract sustained international support for Ukraine, two and a half years into the war, and as Ukrainian forces steadily lose ground to Russian troops. He had hoped to present the plan to European leaders in Germany earlier in the month, but that gathering was postponed when President Biden canceled his participation to deal with the effects of Hurricane Milton.“You all know Russia’s psychology,” Mr. Zelensky told E.U. leaders on Thursday. “Russia will resort to diplomacy only when it sees that it cannot achieve anything by force.”Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to speak at a news conference with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, later on Thursday and will make the case for Ukraine’s accession into the military alliance — a key point in his proposals.The Ukrainian leader acknowledged in a news conference on Thursday that the United States was wary that his country’s accession to NATO had the potential to drag the United States directly into the war. But he said, “Invitation to NATO is not at all crossing any red lines, and crossing red lines with whom — with a murderer?”Mr. Zelensky’s strategy, which he refers to as his “victory plan,” also calls for the West to lift restrictions on Kyiv’s use of Western-delivered missiles to strike ammunition depots and other military facilities inside Russia, and to share more satellite data that Ukraine can use to identify and strike Russian targets.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

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      Sadie Sink to Star in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ on Broadway

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      Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for “The Outsiders.”Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from “Stranger Things,” will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading “The Crucible” while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction — plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.The play has nine characters — seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor — and explores how the students’ ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.“As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe,” said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read “The Crucible” in a high school English class.“Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, ‘I should reread “The Crucible”,’ and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it,” she said. “I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase ‘John Proctor is the villain.’”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

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      JD Vance falsely claims Donald Trump didn’t lose 2020 election

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      The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, told a reporter on Wednesday that there were “serious problems” in the 2020 election and suggested for the first time that the then president Donald Trump did not actually lose the race.“Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree with me or disagree with me on this issue.”He was pressed on his response by a reporter later in the day on another campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, saying: “I think that big tech rigged the election in 2020. That’s my view. And if you disagree with me, that’s fine.”The response comes in the wake of a non-response earlier this month, when during an interview with the New York Times, Vance was given five opportunities to “acknowledge that Trump did not win in 2020” and he “refused to say so”.Trump notably lost the 2020 election and currently faces numerous charges related to election interference after being found guilty in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money trial.The Harris campaign criticized Vance’s responses to the question about the 2020 election.“There we have it – JD Vance finally admitted he denies the 2020 election results,” a Harris campaign spokesperson, Matt Corridoni, said in a statement. “As Governor Walz said on the debate stage weeks ago, Donald Trump selected Vance for this exact reason – he knows Vance will be a loyal soldier in Trump’s pursuit for absolute, unchecked, limitless power.”Previously, Vance has sidestepped answering the question directly, deflecting when pressed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, during a debate if Trump lost the 2020 election. He also downplayed the insurrection on 6 January, 2021.

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      “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance said.In September 2024, during a podcast interview, Vance responded to a question on what he would have done differently than the former vice-president Mike Pence in January 2021: “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”Vance was once a critic of Trump, comparing him to Hitler ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He shifted toward backing Trump’s election denial claims as he vied to be his running mate.Shortly before joining the Trump campaign, Vance claimed in an interview with the ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Mike Pence could have done more, whether you agree or disagree, Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”Trump has claimed there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win the 2024 election. He also claimed his supporters will not have to vote any more if he wins as Trump and his allies have laid the foundation to contest the 2024 election results. More

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      Is the Trump Trade Back?

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      Market observers see signs that investors increasingly believe Donald Trump will win the election, but there may be alternate explanations for a shift in sentiment. A rally in some stocks, cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump’s social media company are some signs of investors betting on the former president to win in November.Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersA trade makes a comeback The election polls may be deadlocked. But in the markets, some investors are indicating that they see Donald Trump as increasingly likely to win the White House, a belief that seems to mirror a swing in the prediction markets.Market observers see the return of the so-called Trump trade, which posits that certain industry sectors and financial assets — think oil drillers and cryptocurrencies — would benefit from the former president bringing in lower taxes and less regulation.The signs that the Trump trade is gaining steam: Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire financier, told Bloomberg yesterday that over the past 12 days, markets appeared “very convinced Trump is going to win.” (It’s worth noting that Druckenmiller said he didn’t plan to vote for either candidate.)Among the evidence Druckenmiller pointed to:A rally in bank stocks, which are up 8.5 percent over the past two weeks. (That said, banks have so far reported better-than-expected earnings.)Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the former president’s unprofitable social media company, have soared since late September, adding nearly $2 billion to its market value. But the stock’s volatile trading hasn’t always correlated with polls or prediction markets, and it’s unclear whether the company would draw more advertisers if Trump won. Some companies might flock to the platform to curry political favor; others might stay away.Bitcoin has risen about 13 percent in the past week. The cryptocurrency world has largely bet on a second Trump administration being friendlier to digital assets, though Vice President Kamala Harris has made appeals to the industry.Also, the dollar approached a two-and-a-half month high this morning as currency traders appear to be pricing in a Trump victory, betting that his economic policies would drive up inflation, lower the price of bonds and strengthen the dollar. (That said, Trump wants a weak greenback.)But there are potential pitfalls to betting on Trump. “It is a thing in the financial markets,” Holger Schmieding, the chief economist at Berenberg, a German bank, said of the Trump trade.He told DealBook: “I don’t agree with it in the long run. Higher tariffs and less immigration would hurt U.S. vitality.”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

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      ‘The Line’ Review: Greek Tragedy

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      The dark side of college fraternity life comes to light in this harrowing, well-acted campus drama.Films about fraternities tend to describe a familiar arc of moral degradation, and Ethan Berger’s campus cautionary tale “The Line,” about the initiation of freshmen into a well-heeled but toxic brotherhood at a Southern liberal arts college, is no exception: You probably won’t be shocked to learn that frat life is crude, boorish and dangerous, as “The Line” makes abundantly clear. But if the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor. Berger takes a keen anthropological approach to the rites and rituals of the fictitious Kappa Nu Alpha house, and he makes it so that you can almost smell the stale beer and crumpled Ralph Lauren. The details are believable, and therefore more disturbing.Our entree into the crass, bad-mannered world of KNA is Tom Backster (Alex Wolff), an obtuse sophomore militantly devoted to the traditions of the frat. Wolff plays him with a thick, mealy-mouthed Southern accent, which he painfully exaggerates to better fit in with his dunderheaded peers, for whom articulating a full sentence is tantamount to betrayal.Tom’s clashes with Gettys O’Brien (Austin Abrams), the club’s handsome, Billy Budd-esque newcomer who repeatedly flaunts the rules, is the conflict at the heart of the movie. Its escalation is predictable, but Wolff and Abrams (both excellent) embody their characters with intensity and conviction, which makes even the film’s most heightened confrontations feel deeply plausible.The LineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More