Author: NY TIMES

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

Late in “Evil Does Not Exist,” a man who lives in a rural hamlet an easy drive from Tokyo cuts right to the movie’s haunting urgency. He’s talking to two representatives of a company that’s planning to build a resort in the area that will cover a deer trail. When one suggests that maybe the deer will go elsewhere, the local man asks, “Where would they go?” It’s a seemingly simple question that distills this soulful movie’s searching exploration of individualism, community and the devastating costs of reducing nature to a commodity.“Evil Does Not Exist” is the latest from the…

Months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada accused India’s government of plotting a murder on Canadian soil — plunging diplomatic relations between the two countries to their lowest level ever — the first arrests in the killing, which came on Friday, did little to demystify the basis of his claim.The police didn’t offer clues or present any evidence that India had orchestrated the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh nationalist leader who was gunned down at the temple he led in Surrey, British Columbia, in June. What they did say was that three Indian men had committed the…

Federal Reserve officials are keeping a close eye on the job market as they contemplate when and whether they can cut interest rates this year. Friday’s jobs report offered early evidence of the type of moderation that they have been hoping to see.Average hourly earnings, a measure of wage growth, climbed 3.9 percent in April from a year earlier. That was both cooler than the previous reading and slightly cooler than the 4 percent economists had forecast.That moderation came as job gains slowed to 175,000 during the month, the unemployment rate ticked up slightly and average weekly hours nudged down.…