Author: NY TIMES

A high school athletic director in the Baltimore area was arrested on Thursday after he used artificial intelligence software, the police said, to manufacture a racist and antisemitic audio clip that impersonated the school’s principal.Dazhon Darien, the athletic director of Pikesville High School, fabricated the recording — including a tirade about “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” — in an effort to smear the principal, Eric Eiswert, according to the Baltimore County Police Department.The faked recording, which was posted on Instagram in mid-January, quickly spread, roiling Baltimore County Public Schools, which is the…

At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.Set in a discount dystopian hellscape,…

Vietnam’s recent political turmoil intensified on Friday as the head of its Parliament resigned, the latest high-level government departure amid a widening anticorruption campaign that has raised questions about the stability of the country.Vuong Dinh Hue, the chairman of Vietnam’s National Assembly, submitted his resignation on Friday after the Central Inspection Committee found that he had violated regulations governing Communist Party members. It did not specify what these regulations were, but it came four days after his assistant was detained on charges of abuse of power.“Mr. Vuong Dinh Hue’s violations and shortcomings, according to the Central Executive Committee, have caused…

Finally, the NFL Draft has finally begun in the city of Detroit.The first-round picks are officially in the books, and each of the 32 picks brings new hope to the teams that make them. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Rounds 2 and 3 are on Friday night, followed by Rounds 4 to 7 on Saturday.It will take some time to see how well these choices play out, but that won’t stop us from reacting and analyzing.We’re looking at the winners and losers of the first round.winnerQuarterback—— Quarterbacks went undrafted Thursday night, with six going into…

Federal regulators on Friday said that they had not yet discovered live bird flu virus in the first batch of retail milk samples they tested, a reassuring indication that the milk on store shelves remains safe despite an outbreak of the virus among diary cows.In an online update, the Food and Drug Administration said an initial set of tests looking for live virus, not just genetic fragments, suggested that the pasteurization process was effectively neutralizing the pathogen.“These results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the F.D.A. wrote in the update, adding that the testing efforts were…

In the sex comedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Joanna Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. Source link

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is about to institute a rare tax increase on corporations and high earners, a move that reflects both the burgeoning costs of his war in Ukraine and the firm control he has over the Russian elite as he embarks on a fifth term in office.Financial technocrats in Mr. Putin’s government are searching for new ways to fund not just an expensive war in Ukraine but also a broader confrontation with the West that is likely to remain costly for years. Russia is allocating nearly a third of its overall 2024 budget to national defense…

Regulators late Friday seized Republic First Bancorp, a troubled Philadelphia lender, in the first U.S. bank failure this year.Republic First Bancorp, known as Republic Bank, had about $4 billion in deposits at the end of January and assets worth $6 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement.“Substantially all” of its deposits will be assumed by Fulton Bank of Lancaster, Pa., the F.D.I.C. said, with Republic First’s 32 branches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York reopening as soon as Saturday as Fulton Bank branches.Founded in 1988, Republic First was smaller than the midsize banks that collapsed last…

“Humane,” directed by Caitlin Cronenberg (a daughter of the celebrated horror auteur David Cronenberg) in her feature debut, builds this world at a satisfyingly rapid speed, raising stakes so quickly that you’re left breathless as the implications sink in. (That also means some of the logical leaps — like how you’d get the whole world to agree to these measures — fade into the background, and that’s fine.) The screenplay, by Michael Sparaga, sets up a society that hasn’t imploded yet but is about to, and is recognizably littered with the detritus of a discourse-obsessed culture very like our own.…

In a first, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the security zone containing the wartime prison and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility at the center of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.It was a noteworthy moment in the arc of the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. No war court judge had before made the five-mile trip to look at the detention operations, where the military maintains the only known, still-intact remnant of the network of overseas prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.But Col.…