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    ‘Reservation Dogs’ Showed D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai What Is Possible

    The actor received his first Emmy nomination for his performance on the acclaimed Native comedy. In an interview, he talks about breaking down stereotypes, and possibly reviving his character.Much like his “Reservation Dogs” character, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai grew up wondering if he was a good guy.If his dedication to his craft and his community is any indication, the 22-year-old actor of Anishinaabe, Guyanese and German descent seems to be a pretty upstanding citizen. The day we chat about his Emmy nomination for lead actor in a comedy series, for example, he is visiting his parents in his native Toronto (from his adopted hometown, Los Angeles) and has spent most of the morning chauffeuring his auntie around on a several-hours-long excursion. After all, mothers, grandmothers and aunties are considered the bedrock of Indigenous communities.That’s a fact any “Reservation Dogs” fan would know. With the groundbreaking FX series, the creators Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo provided a rare look at everyday life on an Oklahoma Indian reservation through the eyes of four teens reeling in the aftermath of a friend’s suicide. Harjo, who also served as showrunner, has said there was only one way to do it: with an all-Indigenous team of writers, directors and regular actors who could authentically tell this story.Alongside his young co-stars, Woon-A-Tai made uncharted television territory feel warm, raw and utterly relatable, garnering “Rez Dogs” broad acclaim as well as four Emmy nominations this year, including a best comedy nod. His portrayal of Bear Smallhill also earned him an Emmy nomination, placing him alongside Lily Gladstone (“Under the Bridge”) and Kali Reis (“True Detective: Night Country”) as the first Indigenous actors to be nominated in 17 years.In an interview, he talked about breaking down stereotypes, possibly reviving his “Rez Dogs” character and being a good, healthy Indigenous man. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Despite critical acclaim, “Rez Dogs” was notably overlooked by the television academy for its first two seasons. What does it mean to you to break through with a best comedy nomination and one of the few Indigenous acting nominations in Emmys history?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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    Maria Branyas Morera, World’s Oldest Person, Dies at 117

    Ms. Morera, who cultivated a following on social media as “Super Catalan Grandma,” died peacefully in her sleep, her family said.Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish woman believed to be the oldest person in the world, has died, according to her family. She was 117.Ms. Morera died on Aug. 19 in Olot, Spain, according to an employee at her nursing home, Residencia Santa Maria del Tura. Her family wrote in a post on her X account that she had died peacefully, in her sleep.“A few days ago she told us: ‘One day I will leave here. I will not try coffee again, nor eat yogurt,’” her family wrote in Spanish in the post. “‘I will also leave my memories, my reflections and I will cease to exist in this body. One day I don’t know, but it’s very close, this long journey will be over.’”Born in March 1907 in San Francisco, Ms. Morera grew up in several American cities, including New Orleans, where her father, a journalist, started a Spanish-language magazine that went bankrupt, according to several news stories written about her life. Facing dire straits, the family returned to Spain when Ms. Morera was a child.There, she lived through the brutal Franco regime, when the country was wracked by civil war, and she survived both World Wars. She had clear memories of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.“I haven’t done anything special to get to this age,” she said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País earlier this year.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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    Phil Donahue’s Neutral Wardrobe Kept the Focus on His Subjects

    The talk show host made a career of exposing polarizing topics while dressed in a relatively neutral wardrobe.The hoary tabloid axiom “if it bleeds, it leads” played no small part in the decades-long career of Phil Donahue, the pioneering host of “The Phil Donahue Show,” who died on Sunday at 88. Mr. Donahue spent three decades exposing subjects difficult for many Americans to confront — homosexuality, atheism, civil rights, consumer protection and abortion among them — to the disinfectant light of daytime TV.Central to Mr. Donahue’s success was his physical appearance. A conventionally handsome man with a boyish cast to his features, he had a perpetually merry look of bemusement and a virile, Kennedy-esque thatch of hair that grayed and then whitened as he aged in front of viewers in their living rooms. The aura Mr. Donahue conveyed was that of genial, avuncular family doctor who distracts you with innocuous banter as he rips off the bandage.Mr. Donahue deliberately played to that look with an on-air wardrobe that occasionally veered toward dapper — vested three-piece suits, wide ties, broad ’80s lapels — but was seldom, if ever, flamboyant. No “groovy” Merv Griffin shirts or turtlenecks for him, or the loud jackets and pastel polyester suits that were Johnny Carson’s sartorial signature. By comparison, Mr. Donahue’s style was resolutely neutral: He wore good clothes that fit his trim frame neatly but still seemed unremarkable, as though bought off a rack at J.C. Penney.When at times Mr. Donahue shed his jacket, it was to roam the studio aisles with his shirt sleeves rolled up, wielding the mic like a baton and putting it and the authority into the hands of audience members, whose questions he once remarked were often better than his.“Donahue’s subjects were often sharp, but his presentation was soft,” Wayne Munson, the author of “All Talk: The Talk Show in Media Culture,” said in an interview. Mr. Munson’s 1993 book took aim at a cultural form that, reviewers noted, blended interpersonal exchange and mediated spectacle and that would ultimately, as few then predicted, give way to all the yapping now consumed on social media.Mr. Donahue’s appearance, demeanor and habit of sharing the mic with audience members suggested his was never to be the authoritative voice of God but that of a neighbor.Getty ImagesWe 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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    What to Know About the Sunken Sicily Yacht’s Missing Passengers, Including Mike Lynch

    Mr. Lynch, the former chief executive of the software firm Autonomy, who was acquitted on fraud charges in June, was with friends and family when the yacht went down in a severe storm.A cruise on the Mediterranean Sea aboard a superyacht was supposed to be a celebratory event for the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who was acquitted in June of fraud charges tied to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to the tech giant Hewlett-Packard.Instead, it turned into a disaster after the yacht, a 180-foot boat called the Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily in a violent storm. Of the 22 passengers aboard, 15 were rescued, one body was recovered and six were still missing. Search operations at the site of the sunken yacht were continuing on Tuesday.Here’s what we know about the passengers.Mike Lynch and his familyMr. Lynch, 59, is a British software entrepreneur who had once been described as his country’s Bill Gates. He founded the software firm Autonomy, which analyzed clients’ unorganized data, and turned it into one of the most prominent British technology companies of its time. He became a widely known corporate leader, who advised David Cameron, the British prime minister at the time, and joined the board of the BBC.In 2011, Mr. Lynch sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion, which was far above its market value, earning him hundreds of millions. But HP investors almost immediately soured on the transaction, and the American tech giant quickly fired its chief executive — and then Mr. Lynch.HP later accused Mr. Lynch of misleading it about the state of Autonomy’s business, setting off a decade-long legal ordeal for the British executive, who denied the accusations. U.S. prosecutors charged him and other executives with fraud, and Autonomy’s chief financial officer was convicted in 2018.Despite appeals to the British government, Mr. Lynch was extradited to the United States last year and was confined to a townhouse in San Francisco ahead of his criminal trial, which began in March. Facing the possibility of decades in prison if convicted, Mr. Lynch and another colleague were instead acquitted of all charges.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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    Minyon Moore Helped Kamala Harris Rise. Now She’s Leading the D.N.C.

    When Vice President Kamala Harris takes the convention stage to formally accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday, it will mark the culmination of decades of public and behind-the-scenes work to make the party more reflective of its multiracial base.Off the convention stage, the moment is particularly meaningful for a group of Black women in Democratic politics who have long championed Ms. Harris’s political rise. And in a serendipitous intertwining of events, one of them is running the whole show.Those who know Minyon Moore, the veteran Democratic strategist and chair of this year’s Democratic National Convention, say she is accustomed to operating behind the scenes. She helped lobby President Biden to select Ms. Harris to be his running mate in 2020. She later left a job in the private sector to help coordinate the effort to support Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination.“You could probably take a bag of rocks and throw it in the air at the D.N.C. convention and they’re going to fall on somebody who’s going to tell you a story about the time that Minyon Moore quietly helped them, quietly pushed them, quietly accelerated them to a place where they now are now yielding influence in a very powerful way,” Jotaka Eaddy, a veteran Democratic organizer, said.Ms. Moore’s role overseeing the convention has required her to depart from the private meetings and side phone calls that have been features of her professional career. It may also test the coalition-building skills she has spent nearly four decades honing. Thousands of demonstrators are expected in Chicago this week to protest the convention and Democrats’ handling of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by the war between Israel and Hamas.Some of those tensions are on display within the event itself. A group of delegates representing the Uncommitted movement, which has protested the Biden administration’s Israel policy, have joined some of the demonstrations and are hosting separate programming.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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    Europe Slashes Tariffs for Tesla Vehicles Made in China

    The European Commission will charge the U.S. automaker an additional duty of 9 percent, much lower than tariffs levied on its Chinese peers for electric vehicles imported to Europe.The European Union is proposing to charge Tesla an additional tariff of 9 percent on its vehicles imported from China while other automakers face rates as high as 36.3 percent, as part of efforts to protect European producers from unfair competition.The updated tariffs, announced in Brussels on Tuesday, would represent a significant increase for major companies making electric vehicles in China and are meant to level the playing field with Chinese E.V. manufacturers, many of which enjoy subsidies from Beijing. Final tariffs will come on top of the existing 10 percent already charged for electric vehicles produced in China.The European Union began investigating Chinese automakers in October. Officials said they lowered the rate for Tesla, down from a proposed 21 percent, because the company did not benefit from the same level of subsidies from the Chinese government as leading Chinese automakers. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The tariffs for Chinese automakers, which would go into effect for five years, all dropped slightly from an original proposal in June, ranging from 17 percent for China’s largest producer of electric vehicles, BYD, to 36.3 percent for SAIC Motor, the state-owned maker of MG Motor. Geely Auto, the parent company of Volvo Car, faces a rate of 19.3 percent.Companies that cooperated with the investigation, including the German automakers BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen, face tariffs of 21.3 percent for cars they produce in China. Unlike Tesla, which has its own independent production site in Shanghai, the German car companies are all involved in joint ventures with Chinese automakers. Because Volkswagen also has an entity with SAIC, some of its cars will be subject to the highest tariffs.Compared with the 100 percent tariffs the Biden administration imposed on Chinese E.V.s in May, the European proposals reflect what experts say is a desire to maintain trade with China, while protecting domestic production. Since the initial tariffs were announced several Chinese automakers have announced plans to shift production to Europe.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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    In Chicago, Biden and Harris Enact a Cast Change Onstage

    The first night of the convention introduced the party’s new protagonist, and gave the old one a curtain call.Notice anything different?The organizers of the Democratic National Convention hope you did. Less than a month ago, the party upended the election when President Biden withdrew from the campaign, and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. Suddenly, the previously scheduled rerun of the 2020 election, tuned out by many weary voters, was new programming, with a new cast.The first night of the convention wasted little time unveiling its new star — even as it also had to finish off the last one’s story arc.Early in the evening, Ms. Harris made a surprise appearance onstage in Chicago to her campaign anthem, Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” The crowd of delegates exploded with cheers.This was an energy that the party had been missing for a while, and the prime-time production was designed to flaunt it. Ms. Harris’s kickoff remarks were brief —“We are moving forward!” — but there was a showmanship to the moment that suggested that the candidate plans to take the fight to Donald Trump where he lives, in the TV lights.If Ms. Harris’s unexpected cameo had a measure of Mr. Trump’s theatricality, however, it had a different energy: expansive and effusive rather than brassy and bold. Beaming and waving to the crowd in a camel-colored suit, she reflected the room’s energy back to it rather than basking in it and soaking it up.This was a big change from the convention Democrats anticipated having just weeks ago, under the tentative, 81-year-old Mr. Biden. The slogans onstage — “For the People, For the Future” — emphasized the message of newness.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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    Greenpeace Tries a Novel Tactic in Lawsuit Over Dakota Access Pipeline

    The environmental group, which is being sued by the pipeline company in North Dakota, threatened to use new European rules to try to limit potential damages.The NewsGreenpeace recently unveiled a new strategy for fighting a costly lawsuit by an energy company that the group contends is designed to silence critics of the oil industry.The suit, first filed in federal court in 2017, alleged that Greenpeace had incited the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017, and it sought $300 million in damages.Greenpeace disputes the claims. It says the lawsuit is designed to essentially force the environmental group to go out of business with an expensive legal fight.Its new tactic, led by Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, would use the European legal system to try to minimize the financial consequences of a potential loss in United States courts. In a letter to the company last month, lawyers for the group cited a new European Union directive aimed at curbing SLAPP suits, or Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Those are defined as meritless suits that seek to shut down civil society groups.The letter called on the company suing it, Dallas-based Energy Transfer, to drop its suit against Greenpeace International, and to pay damages for its legal costs, or risk a countersuit under the new European rules.The BackgroundAfter the Dakota Access Pipeline was approved in 2016, it became the target of high-profile protests by Native American tribes and environmental groups. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe argued that the pipeline encroached on reservation land and endangered the water supply. Thousands of its supporters joined a nearly eight-month protest encampment near the reservation, and tribal leaders mounted their own legal challenge to the project.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