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Her arresting roles in movies like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped shape a generation of independent filmmakers.Barbara O. Jones, an actress whose captivating work in films like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped define the cerebral, experimental and highly influential Black cinema movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, died on April 8 at her home in Dayton, Ohio. She was 82.Her brother Marlon Minor confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.Starting in the early 1970s just a few miles from Hollywood, a generation of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, began making films that pushed hard against many of the tropes of commercial moviemaking.Budding filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Haile Gerima eschewed polished scripts and linear narratives in search of an authentic Black cinematic language. They relied on actors like Mrs. Jones, drawn from far outside the mainstream, to bring their work to life.Mrs. Jones was in some ways the typical Los Angeles transplant, having moved from the Midwest in search of a film career. She took acting classes, but, rather than gravitating toward Hollywood, she fell in with the politically charged, aesthetically adventurous scene around the U.C.L.A. film school, a movement that the film scholar Clyde Taylor called the L.A. Rebellion.She appeared in several short student films, including Mr. Gerima’s “Child of Resistance” (1973), in which she played an imprisoned activist loosely based on Angela Davis, and Ms. Dash’s “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a short story by Alice Walker.Mrs. Jones in Ms. Dash’s short film “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a story by Alice Walker.Julie DashWe 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

Federal prosecutors say Representative Henry Cuellar tried to shape policy for Azerbaijan in exchange for bribes. The country has spent millions in the past decade lobbying Washington.As tensions flared over disputed territory in the Caucasus region in the summer of 2020, Azerbaijan’s squadron of high-priced Washington lobbyists scrambled to pin the blame on neighboring Armenia and highlight its connections to Russia.Unbeknown to members of Congress, Azerbaijan had an inside man who was working closely with the Azerbaijani ambassador to Washington at the time on a parallel line of attack, according to text messages released by federal prosecutors.Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat now charged with accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent in a yearslong scheme, indicated in a text that he planned a legislative maneuver to try to strip funding from Armenia because it hosted Russian military bases.Azerbaijan’s ambassador responded enthusiastically.“Your amendment is more timely than ever,” the ambassador, Elin Suleymanov, wrote to Mr. Cuellar. “It is all about Russian presence there,” added Mr. Suleymanov, who referred to the congressman as “Boss.” Mr. Cuellar’s legislative gambit did not go far. But by the time of the text exchange, his family had accepted at least $360,000 from Azerbaijani government-controlled companies since December 2014, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Houston on Friday.The 54-page indictment highlights the importance of U.S. policymaking to foreign interests, and the lengths to which they go to try to shape it to their advantage, notwithstanding high risks and sometimes questionable results.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

India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, has long been accused of tapping into criminal networks to carry out operations in South Asia. Is the agency now doing similar operations in the West?Months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada accused India’s government of plotting a murder on Canadian soil — plunging diplomatic relations between the two countries to their lowest level ever — the first arrests in the killing, which came on Friday, did little to demystify the basis of his claim.The police didn’t offer clues or present any evidence that India had orchestrated the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh nationalist leader who was gunned down at the temple he led in Surrey, British Columbia, in June. What they did say was that three Indian men had committed the killing and that an investigation into India’s role was ongoing.Before the arrests, Indian officials had maintained that Canada was trying to drag New Delhi into what it described as essentially a rivalry between gangs whose members were long wanted for crimes back in India.After the arrests, a report from the CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting corporation, based on anonymous sources, also said the suspects belonged to an Indian criminal gang. But analysts and former officials said that the possible role of a gang in the killing does not necessarily mean the Indian government was not involved in the crime.India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, has long been suspected of tapping into criminal networks to carry out operations in its immediate neighborhood in South Asia while maintaining deniability.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

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 2, 2024 – The New York Times

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A zebra named Sugar was captured on Friday after being on the loose in Washington State for nearly a week.The last of four zebras that escaped from a trailer in North Bend, Wash., was safely corralled on Friday with the help of a former rodeo bullfighter, a lookout on a mountain bike and a package of white bread.The zebra, named Sugar, had been wandering the grounds of a 300-acre property in an unincorporated area of King County since it had broken free from a trailer on a highway exit off Interstate 90, about 30 miles east of Seattle, on April 28.The mare had been spotted on lawns throughout the week, but officials, residents and wranglers had been unable to capture Sugar, who is also known as Shug.That’s when her owner, Kristine Keltgen, called in reinforcements.“It’s very frustrating because I’m here in Montana trying to organize this search,” Ms. Keltgen, who runs a petting zoo in Anaconda, Mont., said in an interview on Saturday.Among those who helped in the initial capture of three zebras was David Danton, 52, a former rodeo clown and bullfighter, who had been driving nearby with his wife and decided to assist in the rescue.Ms. Keltgen recalled his efforts to build makeshift gates out of rope and panels, and she asked if he would return to the North Bend area from his home in Mount Vernon, Wash.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

New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”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

In a suit filed in federal court in New York, a firm that provided hundreds of millions of dollars to 777 accused the company of double-pledging its collateral to other investors.The American investment firm 777 Partners, whose bid to buy the English Premier League soccer team Everton has been on hold for months amid doubts about the company’s finances, was accused by one of its lenders on Friday of running a yearslong fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars.The accusation came in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in New York by Leadenhall Capital Partners, a London-based asset management company. It said that it had provided 777 Partners with more than $600 million in financing, only to discover that roughly $350 million in assets serving as collateral for the loans either were not in 777’s control or had already been pledged to other lenders.The lawsuit is the latest, most serious claim against 777 Partners, which has for years made bold assertions about its financial health — it has previously claimed $10 billion in assets — even as it was trailed a string of lawsuits, corporate failures and unpaid bills.The suit could have immediate implications for 777’s stalled bid to buy Everton: The Premier League has not approved the sale, and the financially strapped club recently said it was seeking alternate investors.But questions about the company’s balance sheet also carry the risk of contagion for the broader world soccer market, given that 777’s portfolio includes ownership stakes in teams in Australia, Brazil, Belgium, France and Germany, and because it owes debts at all of them.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 company also disclosed in its first-quarter earnings that it had trimmed its stake in Apple, but Warren Buffett, its C.E.O., said he remained a fan of Apple.Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday reported strong operating earnings, which track the actual profit that its array of businesses produce, and a record pile of cash in the first quarter, underscoring the health of the conglomerate run by Warren E. Buffett.The results provided a positive backdrop for Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in downtown Omaha, the company’s hometown. It is the first such gathering for Mr. Buffett’s business empire since the death in November of Charles Munger, Mr. Buffett’s longtime business partner and alter ego, at age 99.Saturday’s results underscore Mr. Buffett’s repeated admonition that the best way to judge Berkshire — a collection of businesses that includes a major railroad, a substantial power-generation business, insurance, consumer brands including Fruit of the Loom and more — is on operating earnings, not net income.For the first three months of the year, Berkshire reported $12.7 billion in earnings attributable to its shareholders, down 64 percent from the same time a year ago. Driving the drop was a steep fall in the paper value of Berkshire’s vast investment portfolio though Mr. Buffett has long warned shareholders to ignore fluctuations in the company’s stock holdings.Berkshire also disclosed that it had trimmed its huge stake in Apple, which Mr. Buffett has called one of his company’s most important holdings, by about 13 percent in the quarter. The value of its stake is now about $135.4 billion, down from $174.3 billion at the end of 2023. (Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, is attending the annual meeting.)But Mr. Buffett said that he remains a big fan of Apple, suggesting that the stock sale was to take some profits off the table. “I would say that at the end of the year it would be extremely likely that Apple would be the largest common stock holding we have now,” he told shareholders on Saturday.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