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      Israelis Go on Strike After Hostage Deaths, and German Far Right Makes Election Gains

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      Listen to and follow “The Headlines”Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioPatrick Kingsley and Jessica Metzger and On Today’s Episode:Workers Strike as Israelis Seethe Over Hostage Killings, by Patrick KingsleyTakeaways From East Germany’s State Elections, by Christopher F. SchuetzeHow a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients, by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie ThomasA Funnel Cake Macchiato, Anyone? The Coffee Wars Are Heating Up, by Julie CreswellA protest outside a military compound in Tel Aviv on Sunday. Many demonstrators on Sunday demanded that Israel reach a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesTune in, and tell us what you think at theheadlines@nytimes.com. For corrections, email nytnews@nytimes.com.For more audio journalism and storytelling, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Special thanks to More

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      Solingen, Germany, Becomes Reluctant Symbol of Migration Battles

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      After a stabbing attack that prosecutors say was committed by a Syrian who was rejected for asylum, the city of Solingen finds itself at the center of a longstanding debate.Two days after a deadly knife attack in the German city of Solingen, the youth wing of the far-right AfD party put out a call for supporters to stage a protest demanding the government do more to deport migrants denied asylum.The authorities had identified the suspect in the stabbing spree that killed three people and wounded eight others as a Syrian man who was in the country despite having been denied asylum and who prosecutors suspected had joined the Islamic State. The attack tore at the fabric of the ethnically diverse, working-class city in the country’s west.But even before the right-wing protests had begun on Sunday, scores of counterprotesters had gathered in front of the group home that housed the suspect and other refugees. They carried banners that read, “Welcome to refugees” and “Fascism is not an opinion, but a crime,” and railed against those who would use the attack to further inflame an already fraught national debate over immigration and refugees.The dueling protests — not unlike those recently in Britain — are emblematic of Germany’s longstanding tug of war over how to deal with a large influx of asylum seekers in recent years. The country needs immigration to bolster its work force, but the government often finds itself on the defensive against an increasingly powerful AfD.The party and its supporters are attempting to use the stabbing attack to bolster their broader anti-immigrant message, with some blaming the assault on “uncontrolled migration” even before the nationality of the suspect was known.“They are trying to use this tragedy to foment fear,” said Matthias Marsch, 67, a Solingen resident who was at Sunday’s counterprotest and worries about a rightward drift in society. “I’m here to stand against that.”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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      German Prosecutors Say They Suspect Terrorist Link in Festival Stabbings

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      The police say they have arrested a man they believe killed three people and wounded eight others at a festival in the town of Solingen, in western Germany.An attack on a crowd by a man armed with a large knife at a festival that left three dead and eight wounded in the city of Solingen, in western Germany, is being treated as terrorism, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Sunday.The suspect is a 26-year-old man from Syria who was living in a refugee residence only a few hundred meters from where the attack took place, the police said on Sunday. The man, wearing bloodstained clothes, approached a police car and gave himself up after 11 p.m. Saturday, the police said.In the attack on Friday night, the assailant aimed for his victims’ necks to inflict as much damage as possible, the police said.Besides planning to bring murder and attempted murder charges in the case against the man, the federal prosecutor is looking into whether he was a member of a foreign terrorist organization, Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for the office, said on Sunday in an emailed statement.The Islamic State extremist group praised the attacker as a “soldier of the Islamic state,” but it was unclear whether the group had any connection to this particular attack.The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has campaigned largely on an anti-foreigner platform and is poised to make significant gains in three state elections next month, jumped on the news. Even before the identity of the attacker was confirmed by the police, one of its leaders called for changes to “migration and security policy.”The authorities had earlier arrested two people who were later determined unlikely to have been the actual attackers, Herbert Reul, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Solingen is, said in an interview on Saturday with a German broadcaster, ARD.A 15-year-old boy, who was arrested early Saturday, is being investigated for not having alerted the police when he learned about imminent plans to attack, prosecutors said. A man arrested by a heavily armed police unit on Saturday evening in the refugee housing facility where the main suspect also lived is being treated as a witness, the police and Mr. Reul said.On Saturday, Solingen’s mayor, the state governor and other political leaders gathered on a downtown square several hundred yards from where the attack took place to mourn the victims. It was an eerie repeat of a similar impromptu service held in Mannheim, another town in western Germany, where only three months ago an Afghan refugee attacked an anti-immigrant rally with a knife and killed a police officer trying to intervene.On Sunday, which was supposed to be the final day of a festival celebrating a city best known for making knives and scissors, a group of mourners met at a service held in a church next to the site of the attack. More

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      What We Know About the Knife Attack in Germany That Killed 3

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      The police have launched a manhunt for the perpetrator, who stabbed people at a city festival before slipping away.German police are hunting for a man who on Friday night attacked nearly a dozen people with a knife, killing three, during a street festival in the western city of Solingen.At a news conference on Saturday afternoon, the authorities said they had not ruled out that it was a terrorist attack because no other explanation for the seemingly random violence made sense.The police said they had detained a 15-year-old boy for questioning whom they believed might have had prior knowledge of the attack. The state attorney is not treating the youth as a suspect.What happened?Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the attacker started stabbing people who had gathered at the festival to celebrate Solingen’s 650th anniversary. The attack occurred during a live music performance, not far from a temporary stage set up for the event, which was billed as a “Festival of Diversity.”The police said it appeared that the attacker chose victims from the crowd at random and that he appeared to target at least one of the victims’ necks.The festival, which was planned to run through Sunday, was immediately canceled as emergency workers tended to the injured and the police tried to get a handle on the situation.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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      Knife Attack in Germany Kills at Least 3 at Solingen Festival

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      The attack took place in Solingen during a celebration of the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding.The attack took place in a central square in Solingen, Germany, during a festival celebrating the town’s 650th anniversary.Andreas Rentz/Getty ImagesA person armed with a knife killed at least three people at a city fair in the western German city of Solingen on Friday night, according to the police. The attacker, who escaped, also severely wounded five others. Officers were looking for a suspect.Local news outlets reported that a lone attacker had turned on the crowds during the fair celebrating the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding.“This evening, we are all in shock, horror and great sadness in Solingen,” Tim Kurzbach, the city’s mayor, said in a post on Facebook. “We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured.”So far, the motive for the attack is unclear. More

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      At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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      In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.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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      Paula Modersohn-Becker: A Trailblazing Artist Who Died Too Young

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      An exultant sense of discovery is the propelling through line of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me,” a glorious exhibition at the Neue Galerie that is, surprisingly, the German artist’s first in an American museum. (It will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in October.)During a career cut short by her death in 1907, when she was only 31, little escaped Modersohn-Becker’s scrutiny. A paramount subject of inquiry was her own self. For some of her 60 self-portraits, which are her best-known works, she bared all: She is said to be the first Western female artist to depict herself in the nude. In many others, she holds a flower or a fruit, like a saint or a nobleman in a Renaissance painting. Either way, she looks unmistakably modern.Only a generation separates Modersohn-Becker from Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who shared her predilection for painting mothers and children. But while the Paris-based Impressionists depicted the bourgeois occupants of drawing-rooms, Modersohn-Becker, who visited Paris devotedly, homed in on the primal.Early drawings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, between 1898 and 1899, depicted the residents — particularly women and children — of Worpswede, an artist’s colony in northern Germany. They capture the harsh reality and vulnerability of their sitters, curators said. Annie SchlechterIt was on a visit to the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris in 1906 that she discovered, a year before Picasso, the power of African masks. She was also looking at Courbet, Cézanne and Gauguin. All of these influences converge in such paintings as “Kneeling Mother With Child at Her Breast” from 1906, where a dark-skinned, blocky woman suckles a white infant (might Modersohn-Becker be alluding to the nourishment she derives from African art?), and “Reclining Mother with Child II” from the same year, of a nude woman lying on her side in a fetal position nursing a naked baby.Those were produced near the end of her life. Yet even at the outset, she showed a gift for channeling traditional methods and tropes to suit her sensibility. In 1898 and 1899, while sketching nude models in the way that art students had done for centuries, she also used charcoal to memorialize the farmers, peat diggers and charity cases in Worpswede, the rural village in northern Germany that she inhabited on and off for the rest of her life.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 Prisoner Swap, Echoes of Putin’s K.G.B. Past

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      A sprawling exchange with the West underscored the Russian president’s loyalty to his intelligence services. It also showed his continued interest in making deals.As he sat in a Russian jail for five months, the human rights champion Oleg Orlov sometimes grew wistful: What if he walked free someday as part of a deal between Russia and the West?The chances that President Vladimir V. Putin would make a prisoner swap like that seemed as remote as a “star twinkling far, far, far away on the horizon,” Mr. Orlov, 71, said this week. The dire state of the relationship between Moscow and the West, and their diverging interests, appeared to rule out the kind of detailed negotiation necessary for such a complicated deal.But last week, it happened, in the most far-reaching prisoner swap with Moscow since the Cold War: Mr. Putin and his ally Belarus freed Mr. Orlov and 15 other Russians, Germans and Americans in exchange for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians released by the West. It was a moment when Mr. Orlov saw anew how core Mr. Putin’s past with the K.G.B., the Soviet spy agency, was to the Russian president’s identity — and to the sort of country he’s trying to shape Russia into.The swap happened because “Putin is a K.G.B. man, an F.S.B. man,” Mr. Orlov said in a phone interview four days after two private jets carrying him and other released prisoners landed in Cologne, Germany. Espionage is a subject Mr. Orlov knows well, having spent decades studying the crimes of the Soviet secret police as a co-founder of the Memorial human rights group, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.The Russian human rights champion Oleg Orlov, shown in court in Moscow in February, was freed in the exchange last week.Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Putin served as a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany, in the 1980s and ran the F.S.B., its domestic intelligence successor agency, in the 1990s. To the Russian leader, Mr. Orlov said, showing loyalty to the F.S.B. and other Russian intelligence services by winning their agents’ freedom trumped the political risk of releasing opposition figures whom the Kremlin had branded as traitors.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