Author: NY TIMES

Qantas, Australia’s national airline, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the country’s consumer watchdog to pay the equivalent of $79 million for selling thousands of tickets to flights that it had already canceled.The airline said in a statement that the payments, totaling 120 million Australian dollars, would resolve a lawsuit that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission filed against Qantas over the issue last year. The commission accused the airline of advertising and selling tickets for more than 8,000 canceled flights from May 2021 through July 2022. The commission said Qantas had known that the flights…

Bedridden and anguished, the writer Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Tormented by spiritual agony and the systemic lupus that would kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I long for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it.”There’s the seed of a good film in this scene, but the filmmakers can’t quite latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of ideas — about O’Connor’s struggle with faith and purpose — never coalesce into a coherent portrait in the movie…

As tensions flared over disputed territory in the Caucasus region in the summer of 2020, Azerbaijan’s squadron of high-priced Washington lobbyists scrambled to pin the blame on neighboring Armenia and highlight its connections to Russia.Unbeknown to members of Congress, Azerbaijan had an inside man who was working closely with the Azerbaijani ambassador to Washington at the time on a parallel line of attack, according to text messages released by federal prosecutors.Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat now charged with accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent in a yearslong scheme, indicated in a text that he planned a legislative…

In bars tucked away in alleys and at salons and bookstores around Shanghai, women are debating their place in a country where men make the laws.Some wore wedding gowns to take public vows of commitment to themselves. Others gathered to watch films made by women about women. The bookish flocked to female bookshops to read titles like “The Woman Destroyed” and “Living a Feminist Life.”Women in Shanghai, and some of China’s other biggest cities, are negotiating the fragile terms of public expression at a politically precarious moment. China’s ruling Communist Party has identified feminism as a threat to its authority.…

In the wake of a tabloid-friendly divorce featuring multiple allegations of abuse, Johnny Depp’s Hollywood profile rests at a rather low point. The French actress and filmmaker Maïwenn, for her part, has made headlines in her home country — including last year, when she reportedly assaulted a journalist.One might expect a film pairing these two actors would produce combustible results. But “Jeanne du Barry,” written, directed by and starring Maïwenn, is an ultimately snoozy historical period piece.Given recent trends, it may go without saying that the picture tries to make something of a “girl boss” out of Jeanne, the most…

Panamanians on Sunday elected José Raúl Mulino, a former public security minister, as their next president, in the culmination of an election cycle that has been embroiled in political turmoil.Mr. Mulino, 64, focused his campaign on job growth and promised to increase tourism and build a rail line connecting Panama City, the capital, with the country’s interior that would create construction jobs. He also pledged to increase agricultural production, lower the cost of medicines and provide free internet access to schools.Mr. Mulino received 34 percent of the vote with more than 90 percent of the votes counted on Sunday, according…

The share of Americans with unpaid medical bills tainting their credit files has fallen in the two years since the major credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — changed how that debt was reported, a federal watchdog agency said this week.But even with the changes, some 15 million people — many of them living in low-income communities and in the South — still have medical bills in their credit files, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director, said in a statement that “further reforms” were needed to scour medical debt from credit histories. The…

The second feature by the Lithuanian filmmaker Marija Kavtaradze asks what a relationship looks like when you factor out the sex. Source link

The bodies of the two Ukrainian soldiers lay motionless in a field for months. Around them were bloodstains and their rifles.The soldiers’ relatives identified their bodies from aerial footage gathered by drone. Though excruciating to watch, it seemed clear: The two men — Pvt. Serhiy Matsiuk and Pvt. Andriy Zaretsky — were dead. Yet more than four months later, the Ukrainian military still lists them as missing, even though subsequent drone footage provided by a fellow soldier weeks later showed them still lying there.“I want to have his grave, where I can come and cry all this out properly,” said…

The first Black woman to run a broadcast news division, Ms. Godwin had a rocky tenure defined by infighting and damaging leaks. Source link