Author: NY TIMES

Perhaps the most enduring public moment for Mrs. Dukakis during the campaign was a debate question posed about her. The debate moderator, Bernard Shaw of CNN, had asked Mr. Dukakis: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”“No, I don’t, Bernard,” Mr. Dukakis replied without emotion before reaffirming his opposition to the death penalty and discussing his record on crime. Analysts called the response tone-deaf, one of the worst in presidential debate history, and said that it helped sink Mr. Dukakis’s chances against his opponent, Vice President George H.W. Bush,…

It is the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its Oscar-nominated lead man, Paul Mescal, has people clamoring for tickets to BAM’s production this month.The excitement recalls a period when the performing arts center consistently drew crowds to see imports like the Royal Shakespeare Company or cutting-edge work by directors like Peter Brook, composers like Philip Glass or choreographers like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.Over the past decade, though, critics say the academy’s pioneering triumphs have been scarcer, the schedule thinner and the productions…

The Israeli cabinet passed a no-confidence motion on Sunday against the country’s attorney general to begin the process of dismissing her. Critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the move part of his effort to curb the independence of the judiciary and purge officials he considers disloyal.Mr. Netanyahu and his allies have accused the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, of undermining them. The no-confidence vote against her, as well as the cabinet’s approval days before of the firing of Israel’s domestic intelligence chief, has rekindled street protests reminiscent of the upheaval over government plans to overhaul the judiciary before the war…

“With Love, Meghan,” the Netflix series starring and produced by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, immerses viewers in her world of at-home luxury. But for the most part, it diligently avoids mentions of specific brands.Certain episodes offer glimpses of brand-name items in Meghan’s universe. In one, while describing the outfit she is wearing, Meghan names three labels (Loro Piana, Zara, Jenni Kayne) to telegraph a preference for mixing high and low. In a later episode, she identifies another product — a doll belonging to Lilibet, her 3-year-old daughter — that, by Meghan’s description, comes across as squarely luxurious.It has “a little…

A foul cell in a Moscow detention center was about the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey expected to find himself after spending 25 years building a flourishing venture capital firm in Russia that transformed some tech startups into global brands.First, beefy agents from the F.S.B., the federal security service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. Hours later he was confined to a holding cell with two other inmates and a filthy hole in the floor for a toilet.“The cell is stuffy and hot, an oppressive stench hanging in the air as if from accumulated decades of human sweat…

Netflix spent over $275 million to make “The Electric State,” a sci-fi action adventure film starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and a slew of sentient robots. Had it opened in theaters, instead of on its service as it did on March 14, the film would almost certainly be declared a giant disappointment.Reviews have been dismal. And though the movie debuted at No. 1 on the streaming giant’s weekly chart of most-watched movies, it had far fewer views (25.2 million) than other expensive features, including “The Gray Man” (41.2 million), which was made by the same directors, the brothers Joe…

NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, on Saturday instructed leaders of the nonprofit he founded to take down a web page that mimicked the design of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site but laid out a case that vaccines cause autism.The page had been published on a site apparently registered to the nonprofit, the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. Mr. Kennedy’s action came after The New York Times inquired about the page and after news of it ricocheted across social media.The page was taken offline Saturday evening. “Secretary Kennedy has instructed the Office of the General…

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.

Israeli forces struck sites in southern Lebanon on Saturday that it said were linked to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, hours after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months.The attacks were the latest example of how the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza was rippling across the Middle East. They also disrupted months of relative calm in northern Israel, where residents displaced by more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah have begun returning home.The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon, and there were no reports of…