Author: NY TIMES

In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case…

Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor who announced on Monday that he would apply for arrest warrants for leaders of Israel and Hamas, has gained a reputation over a long career in international law as a gifted speaker and a tough-minded litigator.A British litigator, he took over as chief prosecutor of the I.C.C. in June 2021. Before that, he had served for both the defense and the prosecution at several international courts.Among his high-profile clients were Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi; and Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, who fired him.One contentious…

Unstable rubble and debris were complicating search and rescue efforts in rural Papua New Guinea on Saturday, a day after a massive landslide buried villages and killed at least three people. Local officials said the death toll was likely to be at least in the hundreds.Nearly 4,000 people live in the three villages engulfed by the landslide early Friday, said Sandis Tsaka, the provincial administrator for Enga, which includes the affected area. He said the death toll was likely to be high because the landslide hit a densely populated area that is also a highly trafficked corridor.“Our people will consider…

Tim Cook has delivered at least seven commencement addresses since becoming the chief executive of Apple. The superstar Taylor Swift, whose concerts have been credited with lifting local economies, addressed New York University’s graduation ceremony in 2022. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Dimon — they’ve all given graduation speeches more than once.They’re obviously not doing it for the money (and typically there isn’t any). Instead, speakers have long seen graduation ceremonies as offering something increasingly rare: a stage where a large group of people gather to hear speakers impart wisdom, advice or whatever else they want to talk about.The appeal…

Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.‘Hit Man’In theaters; June 7 on Netflix.The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically…

The president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, is but the latest leader to die in a helicopter crash. Mr. Raisi and Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, died on Sunday when the helicopter in which they were traveling went down in a mountainous area near the city of Jolfa in northwestern Iran.Here is a brief look at some other prominent figures who have died in helicopter crashes:UkraineA helicopter carrying senior Ukrainian officials including the minister for internal affairs, Denys Monastyrsky, crashed in January 2023 in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, killing more than a dozen people including other pivotal figures…

A Conservative British prime minister sets the date for a long-awaited vote in the early summer and the United States follows with a momentous presidential election a few months later. It happened in 2016, when Britons voted for Brexit and Americans elected Donald J. Trump, and now it’s happening again.Political soothsayers might be tempted to study the results of Britain’s July 4 general election for clues about how the United States might vote on Nov. 5. In 2016, after all, the country’s shock vote to leave the European Union came to be seen as a canary in the coal mine…

This article is part of The Athletic’s expanded tennis coverage, which goes beyond the baseline to bring you the biggest stories on and off the court. To focus on the tennis vertical, click here.It’s a shame to be surrounded by “bagels” at a tennis match.Not winning a game means a mismatch and one of the players is either out of their depth or having a bad day on the field.Bagels — games that end 6-0, as they’re known, because zero looks like one — are viewed as an embarrassment, largely because they’re so rare. According to Opta, 12% of matches…

While in production for “Mad Max 2,” the co-writer Terry Hayes penned an official production document called “The Preamble” that filled in some significant gaps. Most important, it indicates that three years had passed since the events of the first film. According to the Preamble and the opening narration, a war over oil in the Persian Gulf has resulted in riots, looting, civil war, and anarchy on highways across the globe. That brings us to approximately 1988.“Beyond Thunderdome” is set 15 years later, so 2003, according to an interview with Hayes at the time of its release. Dialogue and voice-over…

Pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly interrupted Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday as he began testifying to a Senate committee, calling him a “war criminal.”“The blood of 40,000 Palestinians is on his hands,” one woman shouted as she rushed the witness table where Mr. Blinken sat before officers carried her out of the room.The heckling started as soon as Mr. Blinken entered the hearing room on Tuesday morning. Demonstrators — some with their hands painted red — quietly stood up and called him a “war criminal” and the “secretary of genocide.”Moments later, when Mr. Blinken began his opening remarks, the group…