Elections

Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.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

After a spate of breakdowns that caused long delays, an unscheduled “fare holiday” on the statewide transit network will start on Aug. 26.After struggling to provide reliable service to commuters this spring and summer, New Jersey Transit is giving its customers free rides for a week, Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced on Thursday.The unusual “fare holiday” on all modes of the agency’s statewide transit network, which will run from Aug. 26 through Sept. 2, comes less than two months after New Jersey Transit raised all of its fares by 15 percent. The increase received heavy criticism from customers and elected officials.Mr. Murphy and state transportation officials argued that the fare increase was necessary to close a gap of more than $100 million in the agency’s budget. Additional annual increases of 3 percent are scheduled.Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, said in a statement that the fare holiday was a “thank you” to the agency’s loyal customers for enduring a period when “transit service has not consistently met their expectations — or our own.”During an appearance on “Good Day New York” on Fox 5 New York, the governor said, more plainly: “It’s been a really ugly summer. I think June was one of the worst months we’ve had.”Critics immediately took to social media to carp about the choice of the week leading up to Labor Day, a time when many commuters are on vacation.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

Fans gathering at Wembley Stadium in London said they trusted British security officials to keep them safe.When Taylor Swift canceled three concerts in Vienna last week after officials there foiled a terrorist plot, Swifties soon expressed fears about the pop star’s next shows, in London.Would Swift go ahead with the concerts at the 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium? Given the pop star once said that her “biggest fear” was a terrorist attack on one of her shows, some fans had doubts. Was it even safe to attend those London dates?When Swift didn’t comment on the thwarted attack in Vienna or the upcoming London gigs, fan anxieties only grew.Yet at Wembley Stadium on Thursday afternoon before the first of five concerts there, worry seemed to have given way to excitement at the chance to see Swift perform the latest leg of her globe-spanning Eras tour.In interviews, over a dozen fans, including many from the United States, all said that they felt safe attending the event. Kyle Foster, 46 — wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey like Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce — said he had flown from North Carolina with his partner and two daughters for the show. “We didn’t think twice about coming,” he said, adding he felt confident that security would “be on high alert.”Maya Arbad, 18, who had traveled from Dubai, said two friends had decided not to attend the concert because of the foiled attack. “Their families were just too anxious to send them here,” Arbad said.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

Law enforcement agencies have been working to identify the source of the ketamine that led to the “Friends” star’s death.The authorities in Los Angeles have made an arrest as part of their investigation into the death of Matthew Perry, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.The person, who was granted anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said that more details, including the name of the person arrested, would be released at a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday morning.The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office said in an autopsy report released in December that Mr. Perry had died of “acute effects of ketamine.” The actor, who gained sitcom superstardom as Chandler Bing on the show “Friends,” was discovered “floating face down” in the heated end of a pool at his home in Los Angeles.Ketamine, a powerful anesthetic with psychedelic properties, is increasingly being used as an alternative therapy for depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. It is also used, and abused, recreationally.The police in Los Angeles acknowledged this year that they were working with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to investigate the source of Mr. Perry’s ketamine and whether it was obtained legally. A spokesman for the United States Postal Inspection Service said it was assisting with the investigation.The autopsy report said that Mr. Perry had been on ketamine infusion therapy, but it determined that the ketamine in his system could not have been from his last known therapy session, about a week and a half before he died. The autopsy said the level of ketamine found in Mr. Perry’s blood was equivalent to the amount that would be used during general anesthesia.Mr. Perry had a history of drug and alcohol addiction, which he wrote about in a memoir.The medical examiner’s office said that drowning, coronary artery disease and buprenorphine, which is used to treat drug addiction and for pain, had contributed to his death. More

The prices were made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, which granted the health secretary the authority to negotiate on behalf of Medicare.The Biden administration on Thursday announced the results of negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies over the prices of 10 costly or common medications. The new prices, which will take effect in 2026, are the maximum Medicare Part D plans and patients will pay for a one-month supply.1. Eliquis, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, $2312. Jardiance, for diabetes and heart failure, from Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly, $1973. Xarelto, for preventing strokes and blood clots, from Johnson & Johnson, $1974. Januvia, for diabetes, from Merck, $1135. Farxiga, for diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease, from AstraZeneca $1786. Entresto, for heart failure, from Novartis, $2957. Enbrel, for autoimmune conditions, from Amgen, $2,3558. Imbruvica, for blood cancers, from AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson, $9,3199. Stelara, for autoimmune conditions, from Johnson & Johnson, $4,69510. Fiasp and NovoLog insulin products, for diabetes, from Novo Nordisk, $119 More

Vera Liddell, 68, pleaded guilty to felony theft for stealing more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings valued at $1.5 million, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office said.A former food service director for an Illinois school district was sentenced to prison for stealing more than $1 million worth of chicken wings that were billed to the district but never given to students, the authorities said.The former employee, Vera Liddell, 68, pleaded guilty to felony theft on Friday for stealing more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings valued at $1.5 million, according to a January 2023 court document filed by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.Judge Michele Pitman of the Circuit Court of Cook County’s Sixth Municipal District sentenced Ms. Liddell to nine years in prison in the Illinois Department of Corrections, according to a sentencing document.“The massive fraud began at the height of COVID during a time when students were not allowed to be physically present in school,” the 2023 document prepared by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office said. “Even though the children were learning remotely, the school district continued to provide meals for the students that their families could pick up.”But stolen food was never provided to the students, the prosecutor’s office said.The guilty plea was part of a deal reached with the prosecutor’s office, said Patrick O’Byrne, one of Ms. Liddell’s attorneys. Mr. O’Byrne said that Ms. Liddell expressed “a great deal of remorse” for her actions.“She feels incredibly distraught, terrible about what she did,” he said. “She can’t even believe she did it.”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

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate whose standing has dropped in the polls, sought a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss endorsing her in exchange for a promise of a cabinet post, according to two people briefed on the outreach who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.His effort has been unsuccessful. The news was first reported by The Washington Post.“We’ve reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in a text message on Wednesday night. “We’ve been told that they have no interest in talking with me.”There was little chance the Harris campaign would engage with Mr. Kennedy. Public and private polling has found that as he spent the summer attacking President Biden, he began to draw more support from voters otherwise predisposed to back former President Donald J. Trump. Now Ms. Harris does better in some surveys when Mr. Kennedy is included than when she is tested in a head-to-head matchup with Mr. Trump.Mr. Kennedy, long seen as a potential spoiler in the race, has slipped in polls and struggled to raise money, and he has appeared to consider potential off ramps as speculation has grown about whether he might drop out and, if so, whether he would endorse Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.On Wednesday night, Mr. Kennedy wrote: “I’ve always argued that we should be willing to talk with each other across party lines. I’m willing to meet with leaders of both parties to discuss the possibility of a unity government.”The Post reported last month that Mr. Kennedy had held talks with Mr. Trump about a possible cabinet job, proposing a role in public health leadership, in exchange for his support. And in a leaked video of a phone call between the two men, Mr. Trump tried to cajole Mr. Kennedy to exit the race and endorse him.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

Damon Gulczynski wants to make sure you’re paying attention.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — Verbal communication is a funny thing. I might say something to someone and assume the person heard me correctly, both in words and intent. Successful communication, however, does not happen as often as we would like.Damon Gulczynski’s puzzle isn’t difficult, but it may be easier to solve if you really focus on what he’s saying in the clues. I needed to repeat them to myself a few times before I understood what was going on. At some point, you may even slap your forehead, saying, “Ohh, that’s what he meant,” followed by, “You know what? That’s pretty clever.”Today’s ThemeEggcorns are words or phrases that are misheard or misinterpreted. If the misinterpretation occurs in a musical lyric, it is called a mondegreen. (Think “There’s a bathroom on the right” instead of “There’s a bad moon on the rise” in “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.)Mr. Gulczynski has written some crafty theme clues that contain eggcorns, and, once you understand what he means, the answers will make much more sense.I can tell you, for example, and with apologies to the French, that Americans don’t think of the EIFFEL TOWER as a [Rod-shaped parasite]. We might, however, refer to it as a “Paris sight” or “site” (both are appropriate here).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