Elections

David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play, now in a fine Broadway revival, is a pointed critique of identity, masquerading as a mockumentary.To write yourself into your own play is to put on a very curious mask. If it’s flattering, is it honest? If it’s honest, why bother?Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Todd Haimes Theater. The answers are deliberately equivocal. On one hand, this Roundabout production, directed (as was the 2007 original) by Leigh Silverman, stars the exceedingly likable and handsome Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang’s stand-in, called DHH. On the other, this DHH is a worm.So too is the sinuous story, which requires a ton of exposition to get on its way. DHH, exactly like Hwang, won a 1988 Tony Award for his Broadway debut, “M. Butterfly.” His 1993 follow-up, “Face Value,” won only notoriety. Closing before its official New York opening, it earned the nickname “M. Turkey.”From left, Kevin Del Aguila, Kim, Shannon Tyo and Marinda Anderson. The supporting cast, mismatched to roles without regard to gender or race, are all wonderfully inventive, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Face Value” was Hwang’s theatrical response to the “Miss Saigon” controversy, in which the producer Cameron Mackintosh, importing that megamusical from London in 1991, sought to import its star, Jonathan Pryce, as well. But because Pryce is white, and his character is Eurasian, protests against the casting ensued. Nevertheless, the show went on — and on and on — with Mackintosh dismissing the dispute as “a storm in an Oriental teacup.”Hence “Face Value”: a broad farce, set in part at the “Imperialist Theater,” about the casting of a white actor in the title role of a musical called “The Real Fu Manchu.”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

Corrections that appeared in print on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024.BUSINESSAn article on Monday about California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoing an artificial intelligence safety bill misstated the title of Patrick Hall. He is an assistant professor of decision sciences at George Washington University, not an assistant professor of information systems at Georgetown University.An article on Tuesday about new technologies that could help utilities better plan for the risk of extreme weather referred imprecisely to the development of ChatGPT. Microsoft is an investor in ChatGPT and uses it in its products, but it did not develop it, Open AI did.ARTSAn article on Monday about the heirs of a Dutch museum director who donated a trove of Rembrandt paintings to the Mauritshuis museum wanting them returned to the family misstated when the forger Han Van Meegeren’s trial took place. He was convicted in 1947, not long after Abraham Bredius’s death. (Bredius died in 1946.)A Critic’s Notebook article on Sept. 27 about four Off Broadway shows that tackle political issues in imaginative ways misidentified an event in “Medea.” It was filicide, not matricide.Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email [email protected]. To share feedback, please visit nytimes.com/readerfeedback.Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to [email protected] newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email [email protected]. More

Officer Brendan Sullivan was hit with a fine for harassing a Brooklyn resident who had complained about illegally parked police cruisers.Officer Brendan Sullivan first used the breathy voice of a seductive woman. Then he panted.Then came the animal noises.Paul Vogel, a 52-year-old Brooklyn man, was the recipient of the menagerie of voice mail messages. For years, he had been frustrated at police cruisers and Fire Department vehicles parked on the sidewalk and in crosswalks in his Prospect Heights neighborhood, which drove him to call the city’s 311 complaint line hundreds of times. Officer Sullivan retaliated, calling him and leaving voice mail messages for 10 months, according to city records.On May 16, 2021, the officer used his department-issued phone and left a voice mail of dolphin noises, according to the records. Nine days later, he escalated the harassment, adding seal barks and the bleating of sheep.The six messages that Officer Sullivan left between March 2, 2021, and Jan. 24, 2022, came to light after the city’s Department of Investigation began looking into retaliation by the police against people who had complained about illegal parking. Streetsblog, an online news organization, had been publishing stories about the allegations, including one that quoted Mr. Vogel.Last month, Officer Sullivan agreed to pay the price: a $500 fine to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, which concluded in a disposition that Officer Sullivan had “sought to discourage a citizen from exercising his constitutional right about government action.” He also had to give up 60 days of annual leave, which is worth about $25,000 in pay.Dolphin, Seals and SheepA New York Police Department officer admitted leaving harassing voice mails for a man who had complained about parking.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

CBS News, the network sponsoring Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, is focused on providing a televised forum for voters to learn more about the candidates, Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.The job largely falls to Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the pair of CBS political journalists moderating what may be the last event of the campaign to reach tens of millions of Americans simultaneously.Here’s who they are.Norah O’DonnellAnchor, “CBS Evening News”Ms. O’Donnell, 50, has anchored “CBS Evening News” since 2019. She has a lengthy background in political and campaign journalism. Ms. O’Donnell joined CBS in 2011 as its chief White House correspondent, after more than a decade at NBC, where she covered the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. Before that, she was a print journalist at Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill.In 2020, just before the pandemic, Ms. O’Donnell and the CBS host Gayle King moderated a Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina. Ms. O’Donnell and Ms. King were co-hosts of “CBS This Morning” from 2012 to 2019.In July, Ms. O’Donnell said that she would step down from the “Evening News” after the election. She will become a senior correspondent at CBS News and contribute to its popular news program, “60 Minutes.”Like previous debate moderators, Ms. O’Donnell has not granted interviews ahead of Tuesday’s matchup. But CBS released a statement from her, in which she said her goal as a moderator was “to ensure a substantive and civil conversation that helps voters understand more about what can be complex policy positions.”Margaret BrennanModerator, “Face the Nation”Ms. Brennan, 44, has moderated “Face the Nation,” the flagship CBS Sunday morning public affairs show, since 2018. She is also CBS’s chief foreign affairs correspondent.Before she took over “Face the Nation,” Ms. Brennan covered the White House and the State Department. She joined CBS in 2012 following a career as a financial journalist at CNBC and Bloomberg Television. Her reporting has encompassed the Trump administration and significant international stories involving American diplomacy in the Middle East and with North Korea.“In a debate, we’re performing a public service and that is to tee up a conversation in which the candidates use the time themselves to make their case about why their policy is best for Americans,” Mr. Brennan said in a statement provided by CBS. More

Donald Trump’s lawyers made a last-ditch effort on Tuesday to limit the amount of evidence that could become public that special counsel prosecutors collected during their criminal investigation into the former US president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The prosecutors last week filed under seal a brief, which may be as long as 180 pages, to presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan that defends the viability of the charges against Trump even after the US supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling.Simultaneously, the prosecutors asked the judge to allow them to file a public version of the secret brief with quotations and references to grand jury testimony from some of Trump’s closest aides, such as his former chief of staff, and his former vice-president, Mike Pence.To protect the integrity of proceedings and to protect lesser-known witnesses, the prosecutors said they intended in their public filing to redact specific names and use job titles to give context to the information being referenced.The kinds of identifiers being proposed by prosecutors include, according to their filing: “Campaign Manager”, “Arizona’s Governor”, “Senior Campaign Advisor”, “executive assistant”, “the Defendant’s Chief of Staff”, “Georgia Attorney General” and “Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee”.View image in fullscreenOn Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers bitterly complained that the redactions were so specific that it would make public identification of the witnesses easy, accusing prosecutors of trying to damage Trump’s presidential campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day.“In numerous instances, the redactions and pseudonyms proposed by the Special Counsel’s Office fail to meaningfully mitigate the privacy and safety issues the Office references in the Motion and has previously discussed at length,” the Trump lawyers wrote.Trump’s lawyers also claimed that prosecutors were adopting a double standard over redactions: in the case they brought against Trump in Florida over his retention of classified documents, which has since been dismissed, prosecutors pushed for no identifying information whatsoever.“Use of functionally impotent redactions is flatly inconsistent with the Office’s approach to other filings here and in the Southern District of Florida, where they sought to anonymize even ‘Ancillary Names’ based on privacy concerns,” the Trump lawyers wrote.The situation reflects a role reversal for Trump and the special counsel. When it was more expedient for Trump to have witnesses identified in the documents case, so they could complain about the case in public, Trump pushed for looser redactions.But now that it is against Trump’s interests to have the identities of former officials who testified against him become public, Trump has sought for more restrictive redactions that would make public scrutiny of his plot to overturn the 2020 election harder.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe special counsel’s filing and Trump’s objections come in the aftermath of the supreme court conferring broad immunity from criminal prosecutions to former presidents for actions that related to their official duties in office.As part of the decision, the court’s conservative supermajority ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could remain and proceed to trial.The special counsel’s opening brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Much of the evidence Smith uses to make his case come from sensitive sources, such as grand jury testimony, which are secret.Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment should be kept as well as how much of the special counsel’s evidence can be unsealed to make her determination, although much of the evidence became public knowledge during the House January 6 committee’s hearings two years ago. More

The police in Switzerland’s largest city said they had arrested a 23-year-old man after a midday stabbing attack.Three boys were injured, one seriously, in a stabbing attack near a daycare center in Zurich on Tuesday, the local police said.The police said in a statement they had arrested a 23-year-old Chinese man in connection with the attack. The children, who the police said were 5 years old, had been walking with a worker from a nearby daycare center around midday, when they were suddenly stabbed.The day care worker worked quickly to overpower the attacker, the police said. A bystander helped and restrained the attacker until the police arrived. The police added that there was no longer any danger to the public. They did not specify the weapon used.The boys were taken to the hospital. One was seriously injured; two had moderate injuries.Photos published by local Swiss news media showed swarms of law enforcement officers and several ambulances around the child care facility in Zurich, the largest city in Switzerland. The local media reported that the police were escorting parents to the child care facility, and that some of the officers were heavily armed.The Zurich city police said in the statement that they had been notified about the attack shortly after noon on Tuesday. Forensic specialists arrived on the scene to collect evidence, the police said. Mental health specialists were there to help people who were involved in the violent incident.Violent attacks are rare in Switzerland.In 2021, the country had one of the lowest homicide rates in Western Europe, according to data from the United Nations, with 0.5 victims of intentional homicide per 100,0000 people. Last year, there were about 47,000 violent crimes in Switzerland, which has about 8.5 million people, according to Swiss government data.The country recorded 53 homicides in 2023. More

The show is about a real World War II episode in which British intelligence planted disinformation on a dead body to fool the Germans.“Operation Mincemeat,” an improbably successful British musical comedy, already has a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality to it: It’s about a World War II military ruse in which British intelligence planted fake information on a dead body to (successfully) mislead the Germans.Now the producers of “Operation Mincemeat” are hoping for another hard-to-believe turn of events: Finding success on Broadway at a time when many other shows have big stars or big brands.The oddball show began its life in a tiny London theater and then this year won the Olivier Award — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — for best new musical. On Tuesday, the show’s producers announced that the musical’s first production outside Britain will open on Broadway next spring, with previews beginning on Feb. 15 and an opening slated for March 20 at the John Golden Theater.A lead producer, Jon Thoday, said in an interview that he was concerned about opening in a climate dominated by celebrities, but also inspired by the success of plays like “Stereophonic” and “Oh, Mary!” that demonstrate it is still possible for unknown shows with little-known casts to break through.“It’s daunting, because you come here and you look at one show after another with a giant Hollywood star in it, and we’re doing a show with people who had never written a musical before,” said Thoday, whose company, Avalon, is producing the show. “We’re going to see whether it works here or not. We’re hoping it will, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”“Operation Mincemeat” is set in 1943 and based on a true story that is seemingly so crazy it has repeatedly been adapted and written about. The musical was written and composed by a comedy group called SpitLip — David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts — which bills itself as “makers of big, dumb musicals.” Their show, directed by Robert Hastie, had several small productions around London before arriving on the West End in early 2023.Powered by heart and humor, the show has had strong word-of-mouth — it has a passionate group of fans and repeat attenders who are affectionately known as mincefluencers — and has become profitable in the West End, where it continues to run. Thoday said he hopes that the original cast will come to New York, but that that depends on whether they are able to get visas.Thoday said he expected that the show would be capitalized for about $11.5 million.“Operation Mincemeat” is not the only show to announce Broadway plans this week. On Monday, the producers of a musical adaptation of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” said their show would come to Broadway at an unspecified point next year. More

A 43ft (13 meters) effigy of an entirely nude Donald Trump on the interstate from Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada, has been dismissed as “deplorable” and “pornographic” by Republicans in the state.In a statement, the Nevada Republican party said it “strongly condemns” the effigy of the former president, which hangs from a crane, weighs 6,000lbs, is made from foam and rebar, is titled Crooked and Obscene and is expected to be brought to other cities as part of a nationwide tour.“While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” said the party’s statement, invoking the name of a city that was essentially founded to capitalize on gambling and sex.The artists behind the graphic effigy – who want to remain anonymous – told the Wrap that Trump’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability and the public personas of political figures”.Political battles over statuary run hot and have become a feature of the Trump era after he won the presidency in 2016.For instance, hundreds of statues paying tribute to the white supremacist Confederacy that lost the US civil war have come down in southern states where the Confederacy was based after a spate of police killings victimizing Black Americans.The Trump effigy and the offense Republicans took over it drew attention days after he boasted at a political rally in Wisconsin of his “beautiful body”. It was taken down Monday with plans to move it to other swing states in November’s presidential election, during which Trump is seeking a return to the White House as the Republican nominee.The sculpture in Las Vegas came eight years after artist Joshua “Ginger” Monroe created statues of Trump that he told a Cleveland news outlet took four to five months of strenuous labor to create. He described it as a “hate-filled labor to create this monstrosity”.Monroe told Cleveland Magazine the following year: “The reason we show Trump’s veins [is] to show a visible representation of his thin skin.”At the same time, a 16ft effigy of Trump’s rival in November’s presidential race, Kamala Harris, has been put up at the United States Funhouse in West Hartford, Connecticut. The display is from Matt Warshauer, a professor and political historian at Central Connecticut State University – and it likens Harris to the Statue of Liberty.Warshauer says he sees Harris – whose statue is flanked by Halloween skeletons and ghouls – not as “a fundamental threat to the system”.“I see her as a stable force,” he said.A statement on the statue suggests it could be the last of Warshauer’s annual political displaying. It declares the piece as “the final year of Political Halloween”. More