Elections

The man, Win Rozario, 19, had called 911 and seemed to be in mental distress, officials and his family said. The police appeared to shoot him at least four times.Body camera footage of the police fatally shooting a 19-year-old Queens man in his kitchen in March shows what the police had described as a “chaotic” situation. But the video, released Friday, also renewed criticism of the decision to open fire on the man, who was holding scissors and seemed to be in mental distress.The man, Win Rozario, was declared dead at a hospital after the shooting on March 27, the police said. The New York attorney general’s office released the footage from body-worn cameras as part of its investigation into the shooting.The police arrived at Mr. Rozario’s home in Ozone Park that day in response to a 911 call for someone in mental distress, which officials said they believed Mr. Rozario had placed himself while in “mental crisis.” John Chell, the Police Department’s chief of patrol, said at the time that the officers had arrived within two minutes. The shooting occurred about three minutes after the officers, Matthew Cianfrocco and Salvatore Alongi, arrived at the scene, according to their videos.Chief Chell had said the shooting occurred after the situation had become “quite hectic, chaotic and dangerous right away.” He said the officers had “no choice” but to shoot Mr. Rozario after he moved toward the officers with the scissors.But Mr. Rozario’s younger brother, who witnessed the shooting, had disputed the police’s account and insisted that the officers had not needed to fire their guns.The videos show the officers at first using their stun guns on Mr. Rozario as he stands in the kitchen with the scissors, sometimes moving toward them quickly. Mr. Rozario’s mother repeatedly restrains him and stands between her son and the officers even after he has been hit with the stun gun more than once.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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He wrote a popular series of books revolving around a hunchbacked detective, Shardlake, whose troubles echo the author’s experiences of childhood bullying.“Oh, goody! An 800-page novel about the peasant uprisings of 1549!” Marilyn Stasio, the longtime mystery and crime reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, began a column in 2019.It was an assessment of “Tombland,” the seventh work of historical fiction by C.J. Sansom to feature Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective whose exploits solving chilling murders in Tudor England come steeped in suspense and granular historical detail. Readers are made privy to the court intrigues of Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII, eavesdrop on women arguing in a market stall, and inhale the stench of London streets.Ms. Stasio’s enthusiasm was real, not snarky. “Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” she wrote.Mr. Sansom, who earned a Ph.D. in history and a law degree before turning to writing in his late 40s, quickly becoming one of Britain’s most popular historical novelists, died of cancer in hospice care on April 27. He was 71.His death was announced by his publisher, Pan Macmillan, which did not say where he died. In 2012, Mr. Sansom disclosed that he had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, but said it was in remission after treatment. The disease returned during his work on “Tombland,” forcing him to quit writing for six months. He eventually resumed working two hours a day and finished the book, his last to be published.“Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” a Times critic wrote in 2019 in reviewing Mr. Sansom’s seventh Shardlake novel. Mulholland BooksWe 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

Mexican authorities recovered three bodies as a search went on for two Australian tourists and a U.S. citizen who disappeared while on vacation.A dayslong search for three missing tourists who disappeared near a surfing town close to the U.S.-Mexico border continued on Friday as the authorities said that they had located three bodies.Two Australian brothers and their friend, a U.S. citizen, had been on vacation surfing and camping along the coast near the Mexican city of Ensenada when they disappeared on Saturday.The state’s attorney general, María Elena Andrade Ramírez, said in a news conference on Thursday that prosecutors were investigating three people related to the case but that crucial time had passed since the disappearance of the three men.“Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the last few days that they were reported missing,” Ms. Andrade Ramírez told reporters. “So, that meant that important hours or time was lost.” A U.S. State Department spokesperson said on Friday that the authorities were aware of reports of a U.S. citizen missing in Baja California but declined to provide further details.Kira Boyd, a public affairs officer for the F.B.I.’s San Diego Field Office, confirmed in an email that three people were found dead near the town of Santo Tomás but did not specify whether they were the missing tourists.“We are assessing every tip,” Ms. Boyd said. “If credible, we will pursue those leads with rigor.”In 2022, 192 American citizens died in Mexico, State Department figures show, but most of those deaths were accidents or suicides. Only 46 were ruled as homicides.The big waves in Baja California have long attracted throngs of surfers and travelers, many of whom have dealt with rising crime rates for nearly two decades.But record levels of violence have hit the state in recent years. Government data shows that Baja California currently holds first place in vehicle theft and second place in homicides, most of which are related to drug dealing or organized crime, Mexico’s secretary of defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, said this year.An official familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly said a white pickup truck that the missing tourists had been traveling in was found charred near La Bocana beach in Santo Tomás. Other belongings and pieces of evidence were also being analyzed, the official added.The swift effort to find the tourists was a rare exception in a country where nearly 100,000 people remain missing, according to the latest count provided by Mexican officials in March.A majority of cases remain unsolved. Family members and volunteers are left on their own to follow up on leads, but the presence of cartels and a lack of support from the authorities make searching a dangerous mission. More

One of Brown University’s major donors, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht, on Friday sharply criticized the school’s agreement to hold a board vote on cutting investments tied to Israel, calling it “unconscionable” and saying he had “paused” donations to the school.Brown is among a small number of universities that have agreed to discuss their investments in companies that do business in Israel, in order to persuade student protesters to dismantle encampments. Mr. Sternlicht, in a scathing email to The New York Times, which he copied to Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, said the arrangement amounted to sympathy for Hamas, which attacked Israel in October, and described students protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza as “ignorant.”“There should never be a vote when people do not have the facts,” he wrote. “It’s not education, it’s propaganda.”Mr. Sternlicht, 63, said no deal with protesters could be fruitful because the two sides did not agree on “facts and moral clarity,” as well as the scale of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, in which about 1,200 were killed and another 250 were taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent intense bombardment of the tightly packed area has left more than 34,000 dead and drawn international condemnation.He cited the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in wars in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, asking: “Where were the protests?”“As far as wars go, Israel has been quite muted,” Mr. Sternlicht wrote.The blowback from Mr. Sternlicht, who has described himself as a political independent and whose name is on a Brown residence hall, shows how quickly the issue of divestment from Israel may vex universities. Until a week ago, even discussing the subject was widely considered a nonstarter, as it was sure to divide a large swath of students and faculty from many of the businesspeople whose donations fill university endowments.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

Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, released a video message late on Friday, following several weeks of tension over Gaza war protests on campus that have spawned a wave of antiwar activism at universities across the country.On Tuesday, those tensions erupted after Dr. Shafik asked the New York Police Department to clear a building occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters and encampments on campus. Police officers in riot gear arrested more than 100 demonstrators at Columbia University.It was the second time in two weeks that Columbia officials had asked the police to enter the Manhattan campus to remove demonstrators. On April 18, another 100 or so Columbia students were arrested. The decision to bring law enforcement on campus, and also to request that they remain on campus until May 17, has drawn criticism from many members of the Columbia community, including faculty, alumni and students.Over the last six months, the university has released numerous letters to its students, faculty and alumni regarding the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, the war in Gaza and the related protests and unrest on campus. But the video released on Friday was the first one by Dr. Shafik released on the school’s Vimeo page in months. In the video message, Dr. Shafik discussed the need for the community to work together to return civility to the campus after weeks of unrest.“These past two weeks have been among the most difficult in Columbia’s history,” Dr. Shafik said. “The turmoil and tension, division and disruption have impacted the entire community.”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

This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.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 president’s allies say the Justice Department’s chill take on marijuana has a political upside.On Labor Day in 2022, John Fetterman found himself in a room in Pittsburgh with President Biden.Fetterman, a Democrat who was then the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and in the middle of his successful run for the U.S. Senate, had a simple message he wanted to share: Go big on legal weed.And how did the president respond? “He was just, like, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’” Fetterman told me yesterday.The Justice Department on Tuesday said it had recommended that federal restrictions on marijuana become a whole lot chiller. And while it is not clear that lobbying from Democrats like Fetterman has played any role, the move was the latest step by the Biden administration to liberalize the nation’s cannabis policy — something his allies believe comes with an obvious political upside when more than two-thirds of Americans support legalization of the drug.“High reward, zero risk,” said the perpetually sweatshirted Fetterman, joking that he advises Biden only on matters of fashion and weed policy.Biden, a suit-wearing president who is more statesman than stoner, has become something of the pot president. It could elevate his standing specifically with young voters, who support rescheduling, or reclassifying, marijuana as a less serious drug, as well as with supporters of changes to criminal justice laws.One of the president’s allies just wishes he would talk about it more.“He has pardoned people, he initiated this rescheduling, but he has not embraced it. It’s not too late,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, the 75-year-old Democrat who has been pushing for looser cannabis policy for half a century. “The public needs to know that this is the single most significant step that has been taken by the federal government in the more-than-50-year-old war on drugs.”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