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      Shooting Mars Festivities at West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn

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      At least five people were shot and wounded along the route of the bustling event, which continued on despite the disruption.At least five people were shot and wounded along the route of the annual West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn on Monday, briefly disrupting — but not derailing — a crowded and colorful celebration of New York City’s Caribbean community.At least one of the victims was listed in critical condition, with the remaining four expected to recover, the police said.It was not immediately clear what led to the shooting, which occurred hours into the parade, at around 2:30 p.m., near 307 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. But at a news conference, John Chell, the chief of patrol of the New York Police Department, described it as a targeted attack. The gunman, whom Mr. Chell described as a man in his 20s, remained at large as of Monday afternoon.It was another conspicuous episode of violence to occur alongside the event in recent years, but, soon afterward, the parade, an annual celebration of emancipation from enslavement, continued along with its festive music, colorful outfits and decorative floats.Adrianalee Watson, 15, said she was selling bracelets with her mother on Monday when they heard the gunshots and ran into a nearby building for safety. Ms. Watson said she also heard shots fired at the parade last year. On Monday, after ambulances took the victims away, she returned to her spot on Eastern Parkway and resumed her business.“It’s a fun experience, even though you do have people who ruin the fun,” she said. “You’ve just got to be safe about it. You’ve got to have a place where you can go if anything bad happens, and you’ve just got to be aware of your surroundings.”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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      Ex-Green Beret Goudreau, Who Planned Failed Venezuela Coup, Is Arrested

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      Jordan Goudreau, 48, had taken credit for a failed coup attempt against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. He faces federal charges of illegal arms smuggling.A former U.S. Green Beret who orchestrated a disastrous failed coup attempt against the authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in 2020 was arrested Tuesday in New York on federal arms smuggling charges.The federal authorities accused Jordan G. Goudreau, 48, and a co-conspirator, Yacsy Alexandra Alvarez, of exporting military-style rifles, night vision devices, lasers, silencers and other military equipment without a license to Colombia beginning in November 2019 for use in carrying out “activities in Venezuela,” the Justice Department said in a news release on Wednesday.The charges appear to refer to the botched cross-border raid carried out in May 2020 by dozens of armed, self-declared freedom fighters, including former Venezuelan soldiers and former American Special Forces operators, who aimed to topple Mr. Maduro.Mr. Goudreau, of Melbourne, Fla., who did not participate in the raid, publicly took credit for the failed incursion known as Operation Gideon, which he said he had planned with disaffected Venezuelan officials. The audacious rebellion left observers around the world wondering why a decorated former U.S. Special Forces soldier who had served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan was leading a foreign insurrection.A group of only about 60 men had planned to land on Venezuelan soil near the capital, Caracas, from speedboats and ultimately capture Mr. Maduro. But they were repelled by the Venezuelan security forces. Six men were killed and 13 others were detained, including two former Green Berets who were said to have been recruited by Mr. Goudreau, according to The Associated Press. The Americans were sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Venezuelan authorities in August 2020 but were released in a prisoner exchange deal with the United States late last year.Mr. Goudreau and Ms. Alvarez, a Venezuelan national who lives in Tampa, Fla., face charges of conspiracy to violate export laws, smuggling goods from the United States and violating federal firearm export control acts, prosecutors 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

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      Heat Wave Doesn’t Stop Mermaid Parade on Coney Island

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      Dolly McDermott and her mother, Patricia McDermott, were making their way along Surf Avenue on Coney Island shortly after noon on Saturday. They were trying to get to the registration table for Brooklyn’s annual Mermaid Parade, but it was slow going — spectators kept asking them to pose for pictures.The daughter was wearing light-rimmed sunglasses, peach-colored frills, necklaces, bangles, and a foam seashell anchored to her back. Her mother struck a gothic contrast in black and white, with face paint and a full mermaid skeleton running the length of her outfit.“One more! One more!” a photographer pleaded with them.“It’s taken us half an hour to walk this far,” the younger Ms. McDermott, an artist and a self-styled “professional eccentric,” said. “Only because we look as good as we do,” her mother added.Marchers lined up in the shade before the start of the parade.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesThe pair said they had been marching in Coney Island’s pageantry of aquatic weirdness for several years, and that they had not been deterred by a citywide heat advisory. The temperature was already 86 and climbing as costumed marchers and spectators assembled under a cloudless blue sky.But the mood was upbeat as DJs on floats tested their speakers and marching bands tuned up near the staging area at Surf Avenue and West 21st Street.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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      ‘The Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

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      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

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      Paul Auster, Prolific Author and Brooklyn Literary Star, Dies at 77

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      With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author and patron saint of his adopted borough drew worldwide acclaim.Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.His death was confirmed by a friend, Jacki Lyden.With his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks, Mr. Auster was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”Though a New Jersey native, he became indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work — particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood.As his reputation grew, Mr. Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, who was raised in nearby Prospect Heights, wrote in an email. “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”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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      Schtick’s Pop-Up Event Series for Seder Celebrates Jewish Culture

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      The dinner parties held by Shtick, a pop-up series celebrating Jewish culture, draw out New York’s influencers, artists, designers and celebrities.Why was this Seder different from all other Seders?Start with the setup: a glittering table set for 100, running the length of a drafty warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. And it was not just any old warehouse; this is where Joyva, the stalwart kosher candy company, stores its stacks of halvah, a fudgelike sesame confection.Then there were the guests: not your typical Passover assortment of Tisches, Kaplans and Rubensteins. Sitting elbow to elbow at the table, waiting to snap matzo, were dozens of New York influencers, artists, designers, creative directors, chefs and fashionistas. If the prophet Elijah showed up midway through the meal, his seatmates would have surely asked for his Instagram handle.Also unlike most seders, this one, on Thursday night (before the start of the holiday), featured a D.J. with face tattoos who blasted a Hot 97-style air horn at intervals throughout the evening.It was all the doing of Shtick, a pop-up dinner party series around the city that celebrates Jewish culture. The events are mostly invite-only. Guests at the Seder and past parties have included Brett Gelman, the actor; Samantha Ronson, the D.J.; Richard Kind, the actor; Chi Ossé, the Brooklyn city councilman; and the actor David Schwimmer.Shtick is more or less a one-woman project, run by Jacqueline Lobel, a freelance television producer and director whose aim, she said, is to organize “Jewish communal dining experiences that are sexy.”The event began with a cocktail hour on the factory floor at Joyva, a kosher candy company. Its co-president, Richard Radutzky, helped Jacqueline Lobel, Shtick’s founder, announce the start of the Seder.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesWe 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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      After Another Subway Shooting, NYC Wrestles With Question of Safety

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      Even with the National Guard patrolling the system, some New Yorkers say they don’t feel secure, particularly after the subway shooting in Brooklyn on Thursday. Others remain unfazed.The subway crime that Jimmy Sumampow had been hearing about in recent years — as well as his own experience — had already led him to make plans to leave New York City. Then, on Friday, he saw a video online of the shooting on an A train this week.“I’m scared,” said Mr. Sumampow, 46, after seeing the video. Mr. Sumampow lives in Elmhurst, Queens, but plans to board an Amtrak train on Monday for Florida, where he has a new job and an apartment lined up. “I feel I should move out for a while and see if New York takes action and gets better,” he said.For Elise Anderson, however, the shooting did not raise her level of concern.“I wouldn’t say I’m any more scared,” Ms. Anderson, a 27-year-old Brooklyn resident, said as she waited at the Port Authority Bus Terminal subway station on Friday for a downtown A train. “I think we’re in one of the safest cities in the world.”In interviews across the city this week, New Yorkers wrestled with a question that cut to the core of the city’s identity: Is the subway system safe? Subway crime data in recent years shows a muddled picture, and just as they have in surveys of riders and polls of residents, New Yorkers’ opinions diverge.But barely more than a week after Gov. Kathy Hochul sent the National Guard and State Police into the subway to increase security and help ease New Yorkers’ fears, the shooting seemed to underscore the limits of law enforcement’s ability to improve safety underground.The episode took place at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, where the Police Department maintains an outpost, Transit District 30, that is regularly staffed by officers. Moments before the shooting, two additional officers entered the station to inspect the platforms and train cars, Kaz Daughtry, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of operations, said at a news conference on Friday.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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      Ex-Top Editor of The Jewish Press Pleads Guilty to Jan. 6 Charge

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      Elliot Resnick, a longtime journalist at The Jewish Press, admitted that he impeded officers’ efforts to keep a mob from storming the U.S. Capitol.A onetime top editor of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn pleaded guilty on Tuesday to obstructing police officers’ efforts to hold off the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The editor, Elliot Resnick, entered the plea, to a felony count of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder, before Judge Rudolph Contreras of Federal District Court in Washington. Mr. Resnick, 40, of Manhattan, is scheduled to be sentenced in June.Clay Kaminski, a federal public defender who is representing Mr. Resnick, declined to comment.At the time of the riot, Mr. Resnick was the top editor of The Jewish Press, which began publishing in 1960 and describes itself on its website as “the largest independent weekly Jewish newspaper in the United States” and “politically incorrect long before the phrase was coined.”After Politico reported in April 2021 that Mr. Resnick, who began working at The Jewish Press in 2006, had been part of the Jan. 6 mob, the paper’s editorial board published a statement saying he had been in Washington to cover the day’s events as a journalist.“The Jewish Press does not see why Elliot’s personal views on former President Trump should make him any different from the dozens of other journalists covering the events, including many inside the Capitol building during the riots,” the editorial board wrote.Citing court records, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday that Mr. Resnick had not been acting as a journalist that day. Shlomo Greenwald, who replaced Mr. Resnick as the paper’s top editor in May 2021, did not respond to email and phone inquiries on Tuesday.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?  More