Elections

The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode on the Democratic National Convention. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.Can the Democratic Party Reclaim Freedom?The third night of the Democratic National Convention was the party’s pitch to be the defender of freedom.EZRA KLEIN: It is Thursday, Aug. 22. We just saw the third day of the Democratic National Convention, an evening dedicated to the Democrats evolving theory and message on freedom. I’m joined today by my producer Annie Galvin. Annie, welcome to the show.ANNIE GALVIN: Thank you for having me. So, as you mentioned, the stated theme of last night at the DNC was a fight for our freedoms. And from the jump, we heard a lot about freedom.^ARCHIVED CLIP^ Jared Polis: Tonight, let’s talk about freedom.^ARCHIVED CLIP^ Suzan DelBene: This election is about our rights, our freedoms, our democracy, and our future.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

Every night, some of the most famous men in politics seemed to play more of a supporting role.When State Senator Cordell Cleare of New York watched Michelle Obama, the former first lady, speak onstage at the Democratic National Convention this week, she heard a call to action — “Do something” — that thrilled and galvanized the Democrats around her.“Michelle Obama,” Cleare said, “dropped the mic.”She had a more restrained review for Obama’s husband.“President Obama gave good advice,” Cleare said of Barack Obama, who made his party swoon 16 years ago.This year’s D.N.C., which will close tonight with the biggest speech of Vice President Kamala Harris’s career, has made it very clear that, as Democrats tell the story of their party, it’s women who stand at center stage.Every night, women have outshined male party stalwarts — sometimes the ones they are married to — in a development that has highlighted the rising power of women in the Democratic Party and left some of the most famous men in politics seemingly playing more of a supporting role.“You hear the eloquent voice of Michelle Obama. I thought Secretary Clinton gave one of the best speeches I’ve heard her deliver in her career,” said Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, himself a talented orator whose soaring speech on Monday you might have forgotten amid all the big-ticket women, including Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state to whom he was referring.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

Not long after the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989, Donald J. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads about the case, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.The five Black and Latino teenagers accused in the attack — Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray, known as the Central Park Five — served years in prison before being cleared in 2002 by DNA evidence and the confession of another man.But Mr. Trump has refused to apologize.At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night, four of the five men — who now prefer to be called the Exonerated Five — said that what Mr. Trump did to them was devastating and proves that he is too callous and dangerous to serve a second term as president.The men, excluding Mr. McCray, who was not present, offered vigorous endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz.Mr. Wise, who served more than 13 years in prison, the longest term among the group, told the convention crowd that the men’s youth had been stolen from them and they faced the screams of adults as they entered court each day because of Mr. Trump’s actions.“He called us animals. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution,” Mr. Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”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

Hoping to skate by off moody vibes, this revamp of “The Crow” comic book series seems derived from a flattened, Hot Topic image of the hero.In the long and winding road it took to finally get to “The Crow” — with some 15 years of recasts, rewrites, and director switches — the one constant that has remained is that this version would not be a remake of the 1994 film of the same name. It would, the mantra went, instead be a reimagining of the original comic book series by James O’Barr about a man, resurrected from the dead, enacting vengeance on the small-time gangsters who killed him and his fiancée.It’s a sensible distinction to make for any movie revamp, but here is a particularly important and likely futile disclaimer to evade existing in the shadow not only of a cult classic, but also of a tragic and storied legacy — the accidental on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee — that shrouded and ultimately fueled the original film’s beloved status. “The Crow” of 2024 was never meant to be, couldn’t ever be, a version of that movie, a grittily stylized, rough-edged gothic melodrama whose pain and grief was so deeply absorbed by fans because those very things bled beyond the frame.That, of course, is fine and all. But ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA twigs) asks Eric (Bill Skarsgard) about their love story, the film’s central romance, whose edgy sensitivity is packaged with as much real feeling as a perfume ad starring Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. You might think of Shelly’s line as a kind of wink at how Lee’s image became a beacon for brooding cynicism for an entire generation.But the real punchline is that the film itself is the embodiment of that kind of hollow emo teen worship, throwing vague echoes of “Joker,” “John Wick” and “Constantine” into a laundry machine and hoping faded shades of black eyeliner remain.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 latest eruption, the sixth since December, is part of increased volcanic activity that began in 2021.A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted on Thursday, spewing ashes and lava, the sixth such eruption since December, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.The flare-up of the volcano, part of the Svartsengi volcanic system on the Reykjanes Peninsula, marks a continuation of intense geological activity in a region where eight volcanic blasts have been recorded since 2021, several of which occurred this year. Before 2021, the volcanoes on the Reykjanes Peninsula had been dormant for about 800 years.The Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa and a popular tourist destination near the site of the eruption, announced that it had evacuated its guests and that it would be closed on Friday as a “precautionary measure.” Grindavik, a nearby fishing town of nearly 4,000 people, has been largely empty of its residents since January, after volcanic activity started threatening the area.The eruption occurred in a part of a newly active volcanic zone in Iceland that had been dormant for eight centuries before activity that started last December, with its most recent eruption starting in May.Scientists said they expected the zone to continue producing magma and generating eruptions every few months for years, possibly decades.“With every eruption, we see new unforeseen events,” said Matthew J. Roberts, the managing director of the Icelandic Meteorological Office, which tracks volcanic activity in addition to weather patterns.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 British entrepreneur, who was found not guilty of fraud charges in the sale of his company to Hewlett-Packard, was celebrating his acquittal when his yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily in a storm.Mike Lynch, a British software mogul who was once celebrated as a top technology leader — only to spend more than a decade defending himself against accusations that he orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in Silicon Valley history — died on Monday after his yacht sank off the coast of Sicily. He was 59.An official in the Italian city of Palermo confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Lynch’s body had been recovered by divers.Twelve guests and 10 crew members were onboard the yacht, the Bayesian, when it went down during a violent storm. Mr. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued, along with nine crew members and six passengers. Six bodies have been recovered and one person is still missing, Mr. Lynch’s daughter Hannah Lynch.Mr. Lynch’s death came two months after he was acquitted in federal court in San Francisco of criminal fraud charges, tied to the $11 billion sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. The takeover, widely regarded among investors as one of the worst deals in history, led HP to accuse Mr. Lynch of deception.U.S. prosecutors charged Mr. Lynch with more than a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the deal, with a potential sentence running to about two decades in prison.Emergency services search for survivors after a yacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday.Alberto Lo Bianco/, via LaPresse, via Associated PressWe 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

Of all the curious characters spotted bouncing around inside the Democrats’ big tent this week — the influencers, the ex-Trump White House press secretary, Lil Jon — the most curious of all might have been John Edwards.He was hanging at a bar in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood early Wednesday evening, hours before Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota would accept his party’s nomination as vice president. “I wanted to see what was going on!” Mr. Edwards, 71, exclaimed. “Especially this year.” He’s been out of the loop, west or otherwise, for a long while now. He was once the Democratic Party’s golden boy — a baby-faced senator from North Carolina, John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and then a presidential contender himself. It all started to fall apart in 2008. He withdrew from the Democratic primaries. An extramarital affair came to light. The other woman was a videographer paid by his campaign. There was a secret child. A terminally ill wife at home. A campaign finance scandal. Bunny Mellon, the widow of the banking heir Paul Mellon, was involved. It was messy. And then Mr. Edwards went away.When was the last time he was even at a Democratic convention?“Two thousand and uh…” his voice trailed off as he screwed up his face, pretending to think. “God, I wish you hadn’t asked me that, this is a memory test,” he laughed. “I think the last time I went was when I was the vice-presidential candidate. 2004.” (It was in Boston that year.)He said the Democratic National Committee sent him an invitation to attend this year — “which was really nice, very respectful” — and even offered to provide him with a car and driver. (Request for comment from the D.N.C. went unreturned.)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