Author: NY TIMES

China’s top security ministry accused Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency on Monday of persuading a married couple working for unnamed central Chinese government bodies to become spies for the British government, the latest in a volley of continuing espionage accusations between the two countries.In a post on its official WeChat account, China’s Ministry of State Security said MI6 British intelligence officials had lured a man with the surname Wang, who worked for a Chinese government agency with part-time consulting work that paid him a high salary during his visit to Britain as part of an exchange program.The Chinese ministry said MI6…

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke.Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to…

MoviePass didn’t reach five million users, but for a while it seemed as though there would be no stopping it. Under the leadership of Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, the chief executive of Helios and Matheson, the new subsidiary MoviePass Ventures produced the abysmal movie “Gotti” and threw a lot of very expensive parties in mid-2018. At the same time, if you were trying to actually use the service, it went from bad to worse to baffling: random blackout periods, strange requirements for purchasing tickets (like uploading photos of stubs) and near-constant changes to the terms and conditions. Eventually the Federal…

From the bridge of the three-masted windjammer, the Sea Cloud Spirit, the captain called out the words we’d all been waiting for.“Let’s set the sails!” he cried, after turning off the engines, while maneuvering to maintain an optimum angle for his 18 deckhands to climb into the shrouds and unfurl the ship’s 44,132 square feet of sails by hand.Like acrobats, the crew scurried up the masts to the upper topgallant sails that rose nearly 200 feet above us. The ship’s captain, Vukota Stojanovic, later insisted that none of it was for show. “Whenever there is an opportunity to sail, we…

GameStop’s shares soared on Monday after the long-dormant Reddit account associated with Keith Gill, the trader known as Roaring Kitty who helped spur 2021’s meme-stock mania, appeared to show a big stake in the video game retailer.It was GameStop’s second major rally in as many months, seemingly prompted by social media buzz. The stock more than doubled at one point in premarket trading, before settling to a gain of about 70 percent, a move adding billions of dollars to the company’s market value.Monday’s surge was driven by a screenshot uploaded to Reddit on Sunday by the account associated with Mr.…

A new documentary celebrates the life of the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. And it kicks off with the death of her mother, Judy Garland.“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (which premieres at the Tribeca Festival on June 12) opens with the vision of Garland’s rose-covered coffin being carried past thousands of mourning fans in New York in 1969.With that somber start, the director Bruce David Klein is making a point. Rather than dwell on Minnelli’s childhood years in the orbit of her prodigiously gifted mother, he sets out to show that Minnelli, 78, shot to fame almost immediately…

Top NewsFor weeks, talk-show hosts and newspaper columnists across Egypt’s government-managed media spoke with one voice: Any Israeli “occupation” of the Philadelphi Corridor, a buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border, could constitute a violation of Egypt’s sovereignty and national security. That would deal a further blow to a relationship that Israel’s military offensive in southern Gaza had already brought to its lowest point in decades.But when Israel’s military said that it had seized “tactical control” of the corridor last week, the same government mouthpieces were quick to say that the border area had nothing to do with Egypt; sovereignty went…

The attorney general for the District of Columbia reached a $40 million settlement with Michael Saylor and the software company he founded, MicroStrategy, in what the attorney general’s office said was the largest income tax fraud recovery in Washington history, The New York Times has learned.The settlement, which is expected to be announced on Monday, stems from lawsuits filed in 2021 and 2022 accusing Mr. Saylor of evading more than $25 million in income taxes in Washington. Mr. Saylor enlisted MicroStrategy’s help to file fraudulent forms from 2005 through 2020 claiming that he lived in either Virginia or Florida, states…

If you are going to make a documentary about danger, you have to take your camera to daring places. You have to point it at nefarious subjects, doing brazen things, and capture a level of authenticity essential for a credible film.That was the case for the crew on “State of Silence,” which explores the existential threats faced by journalists in Mexico. For the documentary’s tense opening segment, the team accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. When Medina, with his camera in hand,…

In Georgia, protesters waving European Union flags have rallied against what they see as their pro-Russia leaders. Moldova’s government is pushing to join the bloc, enraging citizens hoping for closer relations with Moscow. Armenia, too, has reached out to Europe, angered that Moscow, a longtime ally, is courting its enemy, Azerbaijan.Fueled in part by the Ukraine war, tensions have been mounting within some of the former lands of the Soviet Union, pitting those favoring closer relations with Russia against those orientated more toward Europe.Many of those tensions predate the war, rooted in longstanding domestic struggles over power, money and other…