Author: NY TIMES

Nigel Farage, a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, a driving force behind Brexit and Britain’s best known political disrupter, was elected to Parliament for the first time.The new insurgent party he leads — Reform U.K. — was projected in the national exit poll to have captured four seats, more than many analysts had predicted, in an electoral system that typically punishes small parties. His party has been buoyed by an anti-immigration platform.Mr. Farage won by a large margin in Clacton, a faded seaside town, where pre-election opinion surveys had suggested he had a strong chance of winning. He…

Keir Starmer is all but certain to become the next prime minister of Britain, after an exit poll projected that his Labour Party would win the general election in a landslide on Thursday. The exit poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, indicated late Thursday that Labour was on course to win a commanding majority of seats in the British House of Commons. That would mean Mr. Starmer would replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took office less than two years ago.Mr. Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer, has led a remarkable…

Voters streamed into a polling station in Portsmouth, a city nestled along England’s southern coast that is known for its naval base and historic dockyard, on Thursday morning as ballot workers greeted them warmly.Older couples walked hand in hand into the local church, which had been temporarily fitted out with ballot boxes, alongside parents with children in strollers, and young adults rushing in on the way to work.One by one, they weighed in on the future of the nation in a vote that polls suggested could end 14 years of Conservative-led government.“I just want to see change,” said Sam Argha,…

Thursday’s general election is a pivotal moment for Britain after 14 years of Conservative Party government. Polls suggest that the center-left Labour Party is set to return to power in what would be a fundamental realignment of British politics.Millions of voters in 650 constituencies are voting for candidates to represent them as members of Parliament. The political party that wins the most seats usually forms Britain’s next government, and that party’s leader also becomes prime minister.To win an overall majority, a party must secure 326 seats. If the top party falls short of that, it can try to form a…

The Russian authorities have arrested a top military colonel and charged him with large-scale fraud, the state news agency TASS reported on Thursday. The colonel was previously the commander of troops responsible for a 2022 massacre in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.The authorities arrested the colonel, Artyom Gorodilov, on July 3 and charged him with committing fraud amounting to at least a million rubles ($11,236), TASS reported. A military court ordered that he be held in pretrial detention until Aug. 19, and he faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted, TASS reported. He has denied any wrongdoing.Colonel Gorodilov…

Germany’s first African-born member of Parliament said this week that he would not seek office again in next year’s general elections. Although he played down racism as a factor, he made the announcement in the wake of a slew of hate mail, death threats he said he has received, as well as multiple violent attacks on his office.The lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, a 62-year-old Senegal native first elected in 2013, said in a letter written to his colleagues that he wanted to make way for a new generation of politicians, spend more time with family and that racism was “not the…

Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years.A neon-green line rose steadily across the page, climbing like fireworks in the night sky.That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological…

A psychosexual thriller imagined in blood red and cocaine white, “MaXXXine,” the third installment in Ti West’s nostalgia-soaked slasher saga, is part grungy homage to 1980s Hollywood and part sleazy feminist manifesto. Darker, moodier and altogether nastier than its predecessors — “X” (2022) and, later that same year, “Pearl” — this hyperconfident feature is also funny, occasionally wistful and deeply empathetic toward its damaged, driven heroine.That would be Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), the sole survivor of the dirty-movie cast massacred in “X.” Now a successful porn star, Maxine, eager to break into mainstream movies, has relocated to a Hollywood of…

In yet another dire warning about the coming Atlantic hurricane season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday predicted that this year could see between 17 to 25 named tropical cyclones, the most it has ever forecast in May for the Atlantic Ocean.The NOAA forecast joins more than a dozen other recent projections from experts at universities, private companies and other government agencies that have predicted a likelihood of 14 or more named storms this season; many were calling for well over 20.Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said at a news conference on Thursday morning that the agency’s forecasters…

[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La portada de agosto de Vogue, protagonizada por Jill Biden, se publicó en internet el lunes —cuatro días después del gran debate— y trajo consigo una nueva ronda de escrutinio sobre su papel como ferviente defensora de su marido, quien está inmerso en una preocupante campaña para la reelección.Durante gran parte del mandato del presidente Joe Biden, la primera dama fue una figura poco controvertida. La situación empezó a cambiar cuando la campaña se calentó. Laura Ingraham, de Fox News, afirmó que Jill Biden encubría la incapacidad del presidente por su propio deseo de…