Author: NY TIMES

Russia arbitrarily arrested the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to punish him for his reporting on the war in Ukraine, a United Nations panel said in a statement released on Tuesday, adding to a chorus of public condemnation of his continued detention.In its statement, adopted in March but released on Tuesday, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, said that Mr. Gershkovich, who appeared in a secret court hearing last week to face an espionage charge that he denies, must be released immediately.“Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest was conducted under the pretextual label of espionage but was in fact designed to…

Before her husband died, leaving her to raise their 2-year-old daughter alone, Sarika Pawar had never imagined working a regular job. Like her own mother and most of the women she knew in rural India, she spent her days confined to her village. Her hours were consumed with looking after her toddler, boiling water to drink and fashioning an evening meal.But with her husband gone, eliminating his wages as a server, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a city about 100 miles…

In May, CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing services for A.I. companies, raised $1.1 billion, followed by $7.5 billion in debt, valuing it at $19 billion. Scale AI, a provider of data for A.I. companies, raised $1 billion, valuing it at $13.8 billion. And xAI, founded by Elon Musk, raised $6 billion, valuing it at $24 billion.Such financing rounds have boosted the industry’s overall deal-making by dollar amount and number of deals, said Kyle Stanford, a research analyst at PitchBook.“It’s not declining anymore,” he said. “The bottom has already fallen out.”The activity has prompted some venture capital investors to change…

More than 100 people were killed on Tuesday and many others were injured in a stampede during a Hindu religious event in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where thousands of devotees had gathered.Most of the dead so far have been women and children who appeared to have suffocated in a crush, in the Hathras district, said Ashish Kumar, the district magistrate there.“As of now, the confirmed death toll is 116 people,” said Chaitra V., a top civil servant in the Aligarh administrative region, which includes Hathras.Local officials suggested that heat and overcrowding had set off a panic; temperatures…

One of the messages that helped propel the far-right National Rally to the brink of power in France’s parliamentary elections on Sunday — a once-unthinkable shift — is a common refrain in U.S. politics: It’s the economy, stupid.Both the National Rally and a coalition of left-wing parties called New Popular Front won large gains in part by tapping into anger over a cost-of-living crisis and a sense that President Emmanuel Macron had grown out of touch and did not understand their struggles. Voting happens in two rounds, and candidates who reached certain thresholds will move on to the next round…

Celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, he also contributed (though without credit) to the scripts of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.” Source link

Two candidates, a reformist and an ultraconservative, will face off in Iran’s runoff presidential election on Friday, amid record-low voter turnout and overarching apathy that meaningful change could happen through the ballot box.The runoff election follows a special vote held after President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May.What happened in Iran’s first-round vote?About 40 percent of voters, a record low, went to the polls last Friday, and none of the four candidates on the ballot garnered the 50 percent of votes needed to win the election.The reformist candidate, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister, and Saeed…

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, urged leaders of her political party on Tuesday to reject antisemitism, racism and nostalgia for totalitarian regimes after an Italian news outlet caught on a hidden camera members of the youth section of her party glorifying fascism.“I am angry and saddened by how we were represented by the behavior of some youth of our movement,” Ms. Meloni wrote in an email, seen by The New York Times, to directors of her party, Brothers of Italy.The news report, which came out in two episodes last month, was filmed by a journalist with the Italian news outlet…

Just weeks after Paramount’s controlling shareholder and Skydance abruptly ended merger talks, the two sides have reached a preliminary deal to create a new Hollywood giant, four people familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday.The agreement will still have to be approved by a special committee of Paramount’s board of directors, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as talks resumed.Paramount — the parent company of CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon — and Skydance, the up-and-coming movie studio that helped produce “Top Gun: Maverick,” called off talks in June just before a scheduled vote on a merger. While the…

Bruce Bastian, a founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the favored tool for writing during the early days of personal computing — and who later, after coming out as gay, renounced his Mormon faith and funded L.G.B.T.Q. causes — died on June 16 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 76.Michael Marriott, the executive director of the B.W. Bastian Foundation, said the cause was complications of pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Bastian was finishing graduate school at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s when he founded the company that became WordPerfect with Alan C. Ashton, his computer…