Author: NY TIMES

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam says it will return an Henri Matisse painting that has been in its collection since 1941 to the heirs of its former owner, a German-Jewish textile manufacturer and art patron who sold it to fund his family’s escape of the Netherlands’ Nazi occupation.The museum announced the return of the work, “Odalisque,” on Tuesday after the Amsterdam City Council received “binding advice” from the Dutch Restitutions Commission, a government committee that rules on cases of Nazi-looted art.The heirs said in a statement that the decision provided symbolic justice. “The Matisse underwent the same journey from Berlin…

Margot Friedländer, a 102-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered at Auschwitz, would seem an unlikely — even radical — choice to front a fashion glossy that customarily features comely models and celebrities. But a weathered and white-haired Ms. Friedländer is the latest cover star of Vogue Germany, a distinction she seems to wear as lightly as the tailored coat she models on the magazine’s July/August issue.One of the world’s oldest and perhaps best-known Holocaust survivors, Ms. Friedländer is no stranger to fame. She has met with world leaders like Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, and has rubbed…

Boeing says it has achieved significant quality improvements in the production of the 737 Max since one of the planes lost a panel in a harrowing flight in January.The incident, on an Alaska Airlines flight, resulted in no major injuries, but it raised fresh concerns about the quality of Boeing’s planes more than five years after two fatal crashes. In response, Boeing announced changes aimed at improving quality and safety, including expanding training, simplifying plans and procedures and reducing defects from suppliers.Speaking to reporters this week at the company’s factory in Renton, Wash., a Boeing executive, Elizabeth Lund, also provided…

Kiyomi Lowe regularly hears people mispronounce her name or sometimes forget it altogether. “I get Naomi, Kaiomi, sometimes Kimmy,” she said. It doesn’t bother her: “I’ll respond to anything.”She is less forgiving when friends and acquaintances forget the name of her dog, a shar-pei. “I get Bruno a lot,” she said. To which she responds: “‘No, it’s Brutus!’ The dog doesn’t care. But I care for the dog.”Ms. Lowe is a stylist at Al’s Barber Shop, a popular six-chair salon in Boulder near the campus of the University of Colorado. On a recent morning, she fell into a spirited conversation…

Central Tehran is ablaze this week with posters and billboards of the six candidates in Friday’s presidential election, and the streets are jammed with buses taking supporters to campaign rallies, yet it is hard to find enthusiasm even for voting, much less for any individual candidate.Iranians will head to the polls in a special election to choose the successor to former President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.The election comes at a critical moment for Iran’s leadership. The economy has been weakened by years of sanctions, and under Mr. Raisi’s ultra-conservative leadership, personal freedoms and expressions…

In his two-decade odyssey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity, hunted figure, perennial prisoner and finally, a free man, Julian Assange has always been easier to caricature than characterize.The lack of an agreed-upon label for Mr. Assange — is he a heroic crusader for truth or a reckless leaker who endangered lives? — makes any assessment of his legacy ambiguous at best.Whatever history’s judgment of Mr. Assange, his appearance Wednesday in a courtroom on a remote Pacific island, where he pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, was an appropriate coda to a story…

The Balenciaga couture show opened with a meditation and ended with a storm cloud — one designed to disappear. That’s either a statement of faith in the future or a lot of hot air. Maybe both.In place of the usual finale wedding gown, Demna, the brand’s mononymous designer, offered up 47 meters (155 feet) of the kind of black nylon normally used inside ball gowns wound round and round the model’s head and body like mist, with neither seams nor fastenings.“Thirty minutes before the show, the dress didn’t exist,” Demna said backstage. After the show, it wouldn’t either. When you…

The organizers of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles have promised to have the most ambitious sports program ever and sell more tickets than any other Games.Now they want to be even bigger.LA28, the organizing committee, announced on Friday that the swimming competition at the 2028 Games would be held at SoFi Stadium, the home of the Rams and Chargers, the city’s two N.F.L. teams. There will be 38,000 seats for fans, double the size of typical venues used for most Olympic swimming events — which, along with gymnastics and track and field, are one of the biggest draws…

“The Devil’s Bath” looks and sounds like your average horror movie — there are perturbing scenes of bodily mutilation, menacingly quiet long shots of stark Austrian woodlands and a young woman, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), who spirals into madness.Yet the cleverness of this psychodrama, by the Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (“The Lodge”), is that it employs the tropes and tools of folk horror without any of that genre’s supernatural flourishes. The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and…

For nearly two years, Gong Junli has been waiting. Since his 8-year-old daughter, Xinyue, was stabbed multiple times and her body left in a grove of poplar trees in northwestern China, he has imagined her killer finally being brought to justice.But justice is complicated when the accused is also a child.The boy who the police say killed Xinyue was 13 years old at the time. As his trial opens on Wednesday, it will try to answer a question gripping Chinese society: How should China deal with young children accused of heinous crimes?Countries around the world have long struggled to balance…