Author: NY TIMES

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…

The wall in the police station was covered in sheets of paper, one for every building in the sprawling Beijing apartment complex. Each sheet was further broken down by unit, with names, phone numbers and other information on the residents.Perhaps the most important detail, though, was how each unit was color-coded. Green meant trustworthy. Yellow, needing attention. Orange required “strict control.”A police officer inspected the wall. Then he leaned forward to mark a third-floor apartment in yellow. The residents in that unit changed often, and therefore were “high risk,” his note said. He would follow up on them later.“I’ve built…

Chase Elliott, the most popular driver in NASCAR, has criticized NASCAR after the sanctioning body fined Ricky Stenhouse Jr. a record-breaking amount earlier this week. Involved in a fight after the All-Star game in Nippon Wilkesboro.Elliott knew Stenhouse had been fined for punching Kyle Busch, but the 2020 Cup Series champion held his own on Friday at Charlotte Motor Speedway, site of Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600. The exact amount was not known until the press conference.Stenhouse was fined $75,000, the largest fine issued for a driver fight in NASCAR history. Elliott looked in disbelief when told the exact dollar figure.”Seventy-five thousand?…

Former President Donald J. Trump relentlessly criticized the Federal Reserve and Jerome H. Powell, its chair, during his time in office. As he competes with President Biden for a second presidential term, that history has many on Wall Street wondering: What would a Trump victory mean for America’s central bank?The Trump campaign does not have detailed plans for the Fed yet, several people in its orbit said, but outside advisers have been more focused on the central bank and have been making suggestions — some minor, others extreme.While some in Mr. Trump’s circles have floated the idea of trying to…

After 28 years of peering nervously at the skies, the I.C.N. captures an A.I. bot known to be associated with Harlan. Something is afoot. A scientist named Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez) is called in as the world’s leading expert on Harlan — in part because her mother, Val Shepherd, the founder of Shepherd Robotics, created Harlan and raised him alongside Atlas. At the request of Gen. Jake Boothe (Mark Strong), Atlas boards a spacecraft commanded by Col. Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown), headed for the planet where they’ve discovered Harlan has been hiding out.You can tell from these names that…

The decision by Spain, Norway and Ireland to recognize an independent Palestinian state reflects growing exasperation with the Israel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even from traditional friends, and suggests that international pressure on him will grow.It does not, however, make it inevitable that other larger European states will follow suit. This year President Emmanuel Macron of France has said such recognition is “not a taboo,” a position reiterated by the French Foreign Ministry on Wednesday. In February, David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, said that such recognition “can’t come at the start of the process, but it doesn’t have to…