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de24e86d-881a-481a-8bbb-3506bff73734
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/theater/berlin-theater-prima-facie.html
|
Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin
|
2023-10-10
|
nytimes
|
It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.
This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “
Prima Facie
,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.
The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for
a prodigious and fearless actress.
Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.
A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “
In Memory of Doris Bither
,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “
The Entity,”
a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.
Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.
My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.
At the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.
The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “
Insane
,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for
a sprawling literary blog
and a novel about
’90s techno culture
. His latest, “
Baracke
,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.
For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the
young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.
Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“
Es kann doch nur noch besser werden
”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.
The director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.
“
Toter Salon
” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by
Lydia Haider
and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “
Blut
,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist
Jung An Tagen
.
In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.
Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone.
|
It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.
This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “
Prima Facie
,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.
The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for
a prodigious and fearless actress.
|
Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.
A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “
In Memory of Doris Bither
,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “
The Entity,”
a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.
Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.
My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.
At the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.
The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “
Insane
,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for
a sprawling literary blog
and a novel about
’90s techno culture
. His latest, “
Baracke
,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.
For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the
young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.
Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“
Es kann doch nur noch besser werden
”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.
The director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.
“
Toter Salon
” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by
Lydia Haider
and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “
Blut
,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist
Jung An Tagen
.
In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.
Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone.
|
58b4d2fb-cd8a-466c-bed7-017ea46c6bdd
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/07/07/business/jobs-report-economy-june/the-us-economy-added-209000-jobs-extending-a-streak-of-gains
|
U.S. Job Growth Cooled in June
|
2023-07-07
|
nytimes
|
Federal Reserve policymakers are keenly focused on the strength of the labor market as they debate how much further the economy needs to cool to ensure that quick inflation fades back to a normal pace. Fresh labor market data released on Friday probably offered little to dissuade them from raising interest rates at their meeting this month.
The June data is the last payrolls report that officials will receive before the central bank’s July 25-26 meeting. It underscored many of the labor market themes that have been present for months: Although job growth is gradually slowing, wage growth remains abnormally quick and the unemployment rate is very low at 3.6 percent.
Investors
widely expected
the Fed to raise rates at their July meeting even before the report, and the June data reinforced that prediction. Many paid especially close attention to the pay data: Average hourly earnings climbed 4.4 percent over the year through June, versus an expectation for 4.2 percent, and wage gains for May were revised higher. After months of slowing, those earnings figures have held roughly steady since March.
“On balance, it’s strong enough for the Fed to think they still have some more work to do,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Bank of America, explaining that the report contained both signs of early weakness and signs of sustained strength. “Hiring is cooling, but the labor market is still hot.”
Fed officials are closely watching wage data, because they worry that if pay growth remains unusually rapid, it could make it difficult to bring elevated inflation fully back to their 2 percent goal. The logic? When companies compensate their workers better, they might also raise their prices to cover their higher wage bills. At the same time, families earning more will be more capable of shouldering higher prices.
Fed officials have been surprised by the economy’s staying power 16 months into their push to slow it down by raising interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive and is meant to cool consumer and business demand. Growth is slower, but the housing market has begun to stabilize and the job market has remained abnormally strong with
plentiful opportunities
and at least some bargaining power for many workers.
That resilience — along with the stubbornness of quick inflation, particularly for services — is why policymakers expect to continue raising interest rates, which they have already lifted above 5 percent for the first time in about 15 years. Officials have ratcheted up rates in smaller increments this year than last year, and they skipped a rate move at their June meeting for the first time in 11 gatherings. But several policymakers have been clear that even as the pace moderates, they still expect to raise interest rates further.
“It can make sense to skip a meeting and move more gradually,” Lorie K. Logan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said
during a speech
this week, while noting that it is important for officials to follow up by continuing to lift rates.
She added that “inflation and the labor market evolving more or less as expected wouldn’t really change the outlook.”
Fed officials
predicted in June
that they would raise interest rates twice more this year — assuming they move in quarter-point increments — and that the labor market would soften, but only slightly. They saw
the unemployment rate rising
to 4.1 percent by the end of the year.
Policymakers will not release new economic projections until September, but Wall Street will monitor how policymakers are reacting to economic developments to gauge whether another move this year is likely.
“Jobs growth has slowed but remains too strong to justify an extended Fed pause,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, explaining that the fresh data gave the Fed “little reason” to hold off on a July increase. The question is what happens after that.
For now, investors see another rate increase after July as possible but not guaranteed, and the June jobs report did little to change that.
The yield on the two-year Treasury bond, which is sensitive to changes in investors’ expectations for interest rates going forward, eased to around 4.9 percent, from over 5 percent. The move reflected in part investors’ relief that the jobs numbers had not followed a series of other data points this week that exceeded expectations.
Some on Wall Street expect the economy to soften more substantially in the coming months, which could prod the Fed to hold off on future rate moves. It often takes months or years for higher borrowing costs to have their full economic effect, so more slowing could be in the pipeline already.
This month, one of Wall Street’s widely watched recession indicators, which compares yields on short- and long-dated government bonds, sent its strongest signal since the early 1980s that a downturn is coming.
But Fed officials aren’t so sure. Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said on Friday on CNBC that getting inflation down without a recession would be a “triumph.”
“That’s the golden path — and I feel like we’re on that golden path,” Mr. Goolsbee said.
|
Federal Reserve policymakers are keenly focused on the strength of the labor market as they debate how much further the economy needs to cool to ensure that quick inflation fades back to a normal pace. Fresh labor market data released on Friday probably offered little to dissuade them from raising interest rates at their meeting this month.
The June data is the last payrolls report that officials will receive before the central bank’s July 25-26 meeting. It underscored many of the labor market themes that have been present for months: Although job growth is gradually slowing, wage growth remains abnormally quick and the unemployment rate is very low at 3.6 percent.
Investors
widely expected
the Fed to raise rates at their July meeting even before the report, and the June data reinforced that prediction. Many paid especially close attention to the pay data: Average hourly earnings climbed 4.4 percent over the year through June, versus an expectation for 4.2 percent, and wage gains for May were revised higher. After months of slowing, those earnings figures have held roughly steady since March.
“On balance, it’s strong enough for the Fed to think they still have some more work to do,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at
|
Bank of America, explaining that the report contained both signs of early weakness and signs of sustained strength. “Hiring is cooling, but the labor market is still hot.”
Fed officials are closely watching wage data, because they worry that if pay growth remains unusually rapid, it could make it difficult to bring elevated inflation fully back to their 2 percent goal. The logic? When companies compensate their workers better, they might also raise their prices to cover their higher wage bills. At the same time, families earning more will be more capable of shouldering higher prices.
Fed officials have been surprised by the economy’s staying power 16 months into their push to slow it down by raising interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive and is meant to cool consumer and business demand. Growth is slower, but the housing market has begun to stabilize and the job market has remained abnormally strong with
plentiful opportunities
and at least some bargaining power for many workers.
That resilience — along with the stubbornness of quick inflation, particularly for services — is why policymakers expect to continue raising interest rates, which they have already lifted above 5 percent for the first time in about 15 years. Officials have ratcheted up rates in smaller increments this year than last year, and they skipped a rate move at their June meeting for the first time in 11 gatherings. But several policymakers have been clear that even as the pace moderates, they still expect to raise interest rates further.
“It can make sense to skip a meeting and move more gradually,” Lorie K. Logan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said
during a speech
this week, while noting that it is important for officials to follow up by continuing to lift rates.
She added that “inflation and the labor market evolving more or less as expected wouldn’t really change the outlook.”
Fed officials
predicted in June
that they would raise interest rates twice more this year — assuming they move in quarter-point increments — and that the labor market would soften, but only slightly. They saw
the unemployment rate rising
to 4.1 percent by the end of the year.
Policymakers will not release new economic projections until September, but Wall Street will monitor how policymakers are reacting to economic developments to gauge whether another move this year is likely.
“Jobs growth has slowed but remains too strong to justify an extended Fed pause,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, explaining that the fresh data gave the Fed “little reason” to hold off on a July increase. The question is what happens after that.
For now, investors see another rate increase after July as possible but not guaranteed, and the June jobs report did little to change that.
The yield on the two-year Treasury bond, which is sensitive to changes in investors’ expectations for interest rates going forward, eased to around 4.9 percent, from over 5 percent. The move reflected in part investors’ relief that the jobs numbers had not followed a series of other data points this week that exceeded expectations.
Some on Wall Street expect the economy to soften more substantially in the coming months, which could prod the Fed to hold off on future rate moves. It often takes months or years for higher borrowing costs to have their full economic effect, so more slowing could be in the pipeline already.
This month, one of Wall Street’s widely watched recession indicators, which compares yields on short- and long-dated government bonds, sent its strongest signal since the early 1980s that a downturn is coming.
But Fed officials aren’t so sure. Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said on Friday on CNBC that getting inflation down without a recession would be a “triumph.”
“That’s the golden path — and I feel like we’re on that golden path,” Mr. Goolsbee said.
|
24d7b580-6c2d-4701-bf0e-4b8cd0869979
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/nantucket-home-preservation.html
|
On Nantucket, a Legal Maneuver to Protect Historic Homes From Gutting
|
2024-01-30
|
nytimes
|
On an island where the average home sale topped $4 million last year, Ginger Andrews’s scallop shanty is a golden ticket.
If she had any inclination, Ms. Andrews, a fourth-generation resident of Nantucket, could sell the waterfront structure next week for a life-changing amount of money. The prospect is intoxicating — at least to some of her acquaintances.
“They’ll say, ‘You could have a chef!’” Ms. Andrews said. “‘Or, ‘Don’t you want to travel around the world?’”
But she has a different goal: defending her weatherworn, 19th-century shack against buyers who would gut its unadorned interior, install modern layouts and luxuries, and erase a gritty heritage that has already mostly vanished from the island, 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast.
With no children to pass the property on to, Ms. Andrews has turned to a little-known legal maneuver that is having a moment on Nantucket and elsewhere in New England. She is attaching a preservation restriction to her property deed, requiring that any future owner retain the structure’s essential characteristics. She also intends to ensure that scallopers, who have long shucked their catch in its narrow kitchen, can continue using the building, the last working scallop shanty on Old North Wharf.
“It’s my way of looking at the tide of development here and saying, ‘Stop,’” Ms. Andrews, 69, said, standing in the bare-bones kitchen one morning last month as a tiny space heater cranked against the chill. “It’s the last vestige of the working waterfront.”
To the tourists who swarm its wide brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets every summer, Nantucket looks like a stunningly complete time capsule, dense with pristine examples of Colonial and Federal architecture. Elegant mansions built by 19th-century whaling captains give way to warm brick storefronts, lovingly restored. The public library, with its towering white columns, is a masterpiece of the Greek Revival style.
Behind the picture-perfect exteriors, though, a steady erosion of history has been underway for years, preservationists say, as ultrawealthy newcomers have remade the interiors of antique houses, wiping out centuries-old walls, staircases, fireplaces, doors and windows.
The trend first raised alarms in 2000, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Nantucket one of the country’s most endangered historic places. It cited the demolition of old structures, the removal of original interiors, and new construction that wasn’t in keeping with the island’s character.
While all of Nantucket is included on the National Register of Historic Places — the country’s largest listing, encompassing 5,000 structures — local officials have the authority to protect only building exteriors. As more owners have sacrificed original interiors in favor of new floor plans and amenities, more longtime residents are considering preservation restrictions as a last-ditch means of holding onto history.
After the addition of roughly one new restricted deed each year for the last two decades, the island now has five pending, said Mary Bergman, director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust,
which manages the deed restriction program
. A similar regional effort,
run by the nonprofit group Historic New England
, last year added
six homes in four states
to its roster of 125 protected properties, tying its previous record, said Carissa Demore, the organization’s team leader for preservation services.
The numbers are small, but they may reflect evolving attitudes, preservation leaders said.
“Eventually, the old house, with its integrity and authenticity, will be the rarer thing, and maybe the more desirable thing,” Ms. Bergman said. “There is something deeply appealing about keeping something real, and that seems to be increasingly important to younger people raised in a digital age.”
Philip Carpenter, 74, a retired builder, grew up with an appreciation for old things. His father, an antiques dealer, and his mother, a collector, bought a house on Fair Street in Nantucket in 1962 for $12,000, he said, and carefully guarded its original features. With its five fireplaces, its interior wooden shutters and its classic Greek Revival staircase carvings, it remains “remarkably unmolested” nearly two centuries after it was built, he said.
After watching numerous new neighbors gut the interiors of their historic homes, and grieving each time, Mr. Carpenter said he had no doubts about attaching a preservation restriction to the house he inherited from his parents — even after friends who work in real estate warned him it would diminish the property’s value.
“There are more important things than money,” he said, “and we’re losing that sensibility.”
Peter Dorsey, a real estate broker specializing in antique houses north of Boston, said a deed restriction could enhance a home’s value for the right buyer, by guaranteeing its historic significance. “It complicates things in a good way,” he said, “because it ensures the buyers are the right people.”
Like Mr. Carpenter, Ms. Andrews is grateful to older family members for teaching her the value of the past. Her grandfather, a Nantucket fisherman, bought the gray-shingled shack perched above the harbor around 1906. Ms. Andrews learned to shuck scallops there, and played “king of the hill” on the mound of discarded shells outside.
By the time she inherited the building in 2000, the wooden pilings it stands on were rotting and sinking. As she shored it up — renting space to scallopers who shucked their catch there — the surrounding wharf was changing fast. Other old waterfront buildings sold for millions, morphing into luxury cabins with coveted boat slips.
Receiving visitors on a still, sunlit winter day, Ms. Andrews said she hoped to turn her shanty into a museum of the working waterfront — with working scallopers as one of the attractions. In the kitchen, where orange rubber aprons hang on hooks by the wooden-latched front door, she described the art of scallop shucking with infectious zeal.
Not that scallop fishing is any more romantic. “It’s hard work in the cold,” said Ms. Andrews, an ornithologist, artist and writer who fished in her youth. “You have to resign yourself to snot falling down your face all day.”
Of course, the island’s sky-high housing costs have endangered more than just historic architecture. Year-round residents, including fishermen, laborers and town employees, have struggled to stay on the island, a problem that feels more pressing to many than preserving antique houses.
As the housing crisis has intensified across the country, more preservationists have sought to collaborate with housing advocates, including on Nantucket. There, leaders plan to
purchase a historically protected former lifesaving station
to use for work force housing, and
a “house recycling” program relocates and reuses older homes
that have been slated for demolition.
Michela Murphy, vice chair of the historic district commission in Provincetown, another high-priced resort at the tip of Cape Cod, sees the two goals as inseparable.
“Our job is not only to protect the structures, but the culture and the way of life,” she said. “If we can’t house our workers, the people who keep the town running, we end up with a place that’s unsustainable.”
Keenly aware of the need on Nantucket, Ms. Andrews said she has made plans to hand off the house she lives in,
a 300-year-old property passed down through her family
, for use as affordable housing after she’s gone.
At a cost of $5,000 to $20,000 for each easement, much of it going to pay lawyers, safeguarding history is not cheap. The Nantucket Preservation Trust polices the deed restrictions once they are in place, hiring experts to inspect protected properties yearly to ensure that no disallowed changes have been made. Thanks to successful fundraising, the trust is prepared to go to court should anyone attempt a prohibited construction project.
Four years after Mr. Carpenter initiated the restriction on his Nantucket house, the legal agreement has cleared state review and is awaiting approval by the town. He said he had opted for “draconian” measures, barring future owners from installing insulation or replacing original clapboards.
(Updates to the kitchen and bathrooms will be permitted, as they are in most such agreements.)
His three adult children, who will inherit the property, were not entirely thrilled by his decision, Mr. Carpenter said, “but it’s nonnegotiable.”
When the legal documents are signed, he expects to feel a great relief.
“I’ll feel like I’m leaving the legacy I want to leave,” he said. “It’s a beautiful, old summer house, and that’s what it will be.”
|
On an island where the average home sale topped $4 million last year, Ginger Andrews’s scallop shanty is a golden ticket.
If she had any inclination, Ms. Andrews, a fourth-generation resident of Nantucket, could sell the waterfront structure next week for a life-changing amount of money. The prospect is intoxicating — at least to some of her acquaintances.
“They’ll say, ‘You could have a chef!’” Ms. Andrews said. “‘Or, ‘Don’t you want to travel around the world?’”
But she has a different goal: defending her weatherworn, 19th-century shack against buyers who would gut its unadorned interior, install modern layouts and luxuries, and erase a gritty heritage that has already mostly vanished from the island, 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast.
With no children to pass the property on to, Ms. Andrews has turned to a little-known legal maneuver that is having a moment on Nantucket and elsewhere in New England. She is attaching a preservation restriction to her property deed, requiring that any future owner retain the structure’s essential characteristics. She also intends to ensure that scallopers, who have long shucked their
|
catch in its narrow kitchen, can continue using the building, the last working scallop shanty on Old North Wharf.
“It’s my way of looking at the tide of development here and saying, ‘Stop,’” Ms. Andrews, 69, said, standing in the bare-bones kitchen one morning last month as a tiny space heater cranked against the chill. “It’s the last vestige of the working waterfront.”
To the tourists who swarm its wide brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets every summer, Nantucket looks like a stunningly complete time capsule, dense with pristine examples of Colonial and Federal architecture. Elegant mansions built by 19th-century whaling captains give way to warm brick storefronts, lovingly restored. The public library, with its towering white columns, is a masterpiece of the Greek Revival style.
Behind the picture-perfect exteriors, though, a steady erosion of history has been underway for years, preservationists say, as ultrawealthy newcomers have remade the interiors of antique houses, wiping out centuries-old walls, staircases, fireplaces, doors and windows.
The trend first raised alarms in 2000, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Nantucket one of the country’s most endangered historic places. It cited the demolition of old structures, the removal of original interiors, and new construction that wasn’t in keeping with the island’s character.
While all of Nantucket is included on the National Register of Historic Places — the country’s largest listing, encompassing 5,000 structures — local officials have the authority to protect only building exteriors. As more owners have sacrificed original interiors in favor of new floor plans and amenities, more longtime residents are considering preservation restrictions as a last-ditch means of holding onto history.
After the addition of roughly one new restricted deed each year for the last two decades, the island now has five pending, said Mary Bergman, director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust,
which manages the deed restriction program
. A similar regional effort,
run by the nonprofit group Historic New England
, last year added
six homes in four states
to its roster of 125 protected properties, tying its previous record, said Carissa Demore, the organization’s team leader for preservation services.
The numbers are small, but they may reflect evolving attitudes, preservation leaders said.
“Eventually, the old house, with its integrity and authenticity, will be the rarer thing, and maybe the more desirable thing,” Ms. Bergman said. “There is something deeply appealing about keeping something real, and that seems to be increasingly important to younger people raised in a digital age.”
Philip Carpenter, 74, a retired builder, grew up with an appreciation for old things. His father, an antiques dealer, and his mother, a collector, bought a house on Fair Street in Nantucket in 1962 for $12,000, he said, and carefully guarded its original features. With its five fireplaces, its interior wooden shutters and its classic Greek Revival staircase carvings, it remains “remarkably unmolested” nearly two centuries after it was built, he said.
After watching numerous new neighbors gut the interiors of their historic homes, and grieving each time, Mr. Carpenter said he had no doubts about attaching a preservation restriction to the house he inherited from his parents — even after friends who work in real estate warned him it would diminish the property’s value.
“There are more important things than money,” he said, “and we’re losing that sensibility.”
Peter Dorsey, a real estate broker specializing in antique houses north of Boston, said a deed restriction could enhance a home’s value for the right buyer, by guaranteeing its historic significance. “It complicates things in a good way,” he said, “because it ensures the buyers are the right people.”
Like Mr. Carpenter, Ms. Andrews is grateful to older family members for teaching her the value of the past. Her grandfather, a Nantucket fisherman, bought the gray-shingled shack perched above the harbor around 1906. Ms. Andrews learned to shuck scallops there, and played “king of the hill” on the mound of discarded shells outside.
By the time she inherited the building in 2000, the wooden pilings it stands on were rotting and sinking. As she shored it up — renting space to scallopers who shucked their catch there — the surrounding wharf was changing fast. Other old waterfront buildings sold for millions, morphing into luxury cabins with coveted boat slips.
Receiving visitors on a still, sunlit winter day, Ms. Andrews said she hoped to turn her shanty into a museum of the working waterfront — with working scallopers as one of the attractions. In the kitchen, where orange rubber aprons hang on hooks by the wooden-latched front door, she described the art of scallop shucking with infectious zeal.
Not that scallop fishing is any more romantic. “It’s hard work in the cold,” said Ms. Andrews, an ornithologist, artist and writer who fished in her youth. “You have to resign yourself to snot falling down your face all day.”
Of course, the island’s sky-high housing costs have endangered more than just historic architecture. Year-round residents, including fishermen, laborers and town employees, have struggled to stay on the island, a problem that feels more pressing to many than preserving antique houses.
As the housing crisis has intensified across the country, more preservationists have sought to collaborate with housing advocates, including on Nantucket. There, leaders plan to
purchase a historically protected former lifesaving station
to use for work force housing, and
a “house recycling” program relocates and reuses older homes
that have been slated for demolition.
Michela Murphy, vice chair of the historic district commission in Provincetown, another high-priced resort at the tip of Cape Cod, sees the two goals as inseparable.
“Our job is not only to protect the structures, but the culture and the way of life,” she said. “If we can’t house our workers, the people who keep the town running, we end up with a place that’s unsustainable.”
Keenly aware of the need on Nantucket, Ms. Andrews said she has made plans to hand off the house she lives in,
a 300-year-old property passed down through her family
, for use as affordable housing after she’s gone.
At a cost of $5,000 to $20,000 for each easement, much of it going to pay lawyers, safeguarding history is not cheap. The Nantucket Preservation Trust polices the deed restrictions once they are in place, hiring experts to inspect protected properties yearly to ensure that no disallowed changes have been made. Thanks to successful fundraising, the trust is prepared to go to court should anyone attempt a prohibited construction project.
Four years after Mr. Carpenter initiated the restriction on his Nantucket house, the legal agreement has cleared state review and is awaiting approval by the town. He said he had opted for “draconian” measures, barring future owners from installing insulation or replacing original clapboards.
(Updates to the kitchen and bathrooms will be permitted, as they are in most such agreements.)
His three adult children, who will inherit the property, were not entirely thrilled by his decision, Mr. Carpenter said, “but it’s nonnegotiable.”
When the legal documents are signed, he expects to feel a great relief.
“I’ll feel like I’m leaving the legacy I want to leave,” he said. “It’s a beautiful, old summer house, and that’s what it will be.”
|
e44ad151-807e-4cd9-8612-36bec1375269
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/world/africa/johannesburg-building-fire-south-africa.html
|
Deadly Johannesburg Fire Exposed Years of Neglect
|
2023-11-10
|
nytimes
|
Deadly Fire in Africa’s Richest City Exposed a Secret in Plain Sight
Officials blame immigrants and liberal housing laws, but a Times investigation found the entrenched problems that turned downtown Johannesburg into a blighted tinderbox.
Nov. 10, 2023
Days after the fire, officials in Johannesburg reached for a well-worn script. They gathered the media for a made-for-television police raid.
The blaze had swept through a government property at 80 Albert Street, a deathtrap of a building where squatters pilfered electricity, built indoor shacks out of cardboard and cooked on paraffin stoves. The authorities could do nothing there except sift through the ashes.
So instead, they turned their attention to another government-owned property, Vannin Court. It’s an eight-story building where hundreds of people live without running water or power.
“When people die in these buildings, it is the city of Johannesburg that gets blamed,” Kenny Kunene, a city official, told TV cameras minutes before the raid began. “Now we are going to save the lives of our people.”
Police cars surrounded the building and officials barged inside to find trash clogging the elevator shaft three floors deep. A bathtub sat full of rancid water. Mattresses were wedged into unusable bathrooms. The building choked with cooking smells, decaying trash and human waste. One apartment frequently catches fire, but the stairs on the fire escape were sawed off and sold as scrap long ago.
Johannesburg officials have publicly blamed immigrants and progressive housing laws for the large number of dilapidated buildings like this. But a New York Times investigation found that for decades, multiple governments and political parties have ignored the problem. Financial records show that the city’s property management agency is insolvent, despite holding thousands of properties, including some in the wealthiest sections of the city. The agency, which has been dogged for years by corruption allegations, does not have an audited list of its holdings. Some low-level municipal officials have capitalized on this by illegally collecting rent from squatters, according to multiple current and former city officials.
The city government has effectively abandoned its downtown housing stock, following in the footsteps of many private landlords who have deserted their buildings. Armed men, desperate families and opportunistic squatters have moved in, creating vertical slums in full view of the government.
Despite the many hazards — fire, crime and more — that come with such widespread neglect, officials from the property agency and the mayor’s office have failed for years to even catalog the city’s dilapidated buildings, the first step in averting future disaster.
In response to the fire, Times reporters compiled a list of derelict buildings in central Johannesburg. They reviewed internal city government records, combed housing lawsuits and consulted a document from a lawyer representing landlords. Reporters then visited the buildings and interviewed tenants and others to confirm the data.
The Times count is conservative in a city where whole blocks are blighted by decay and bear the unmistakable signs of illegal and unsafe occupation.
The cause of the 80 Albert Street inferno remains unknown, but these buildings are so dangerous that another tragedy appears inevitable. Within four weeks of the Albert Street blaze, fires broke out in three other dilapidated buildings, leaving dozens of people homeless.
“There are buildings where it would be safer to be on the street than to live in that building,” said Greg Vermaak, a lawyer who represented the city in the early 2000s and now works for private landlords.
Vannin Court was one of several buildings targeted by police raids in the fire’s aftermath. The stated plan was to inspect and perhaps clear them to prevent the next disaster. But nothing would change.
The residents who milled around, watching the spectacle, knew it. So did the officials. After all, the city had failed to fix the building for nearly two decades, despite numerous other raids. In fact, this was the second raid in about five months.
Vannin Court followed a familiar path to despair. In the early 1990s, as white families fled downtown Johannesburg, banks redlined the neighborhood, refusing to lend money there. Real estate values tanked, discouraging investment from landlords who suddenly struggled to find paying tenants.
Utility bills went unpaid, and eventually the city cut off power and water. That is when armed men moved in, according to Masindi Cabrali Mmbengwa, a ward councilor who represents the neighborhood.
The men controlled apartment units, charged rent and used the building as a hideaway, according to the police.
“It became a no-go area,” Mr. Mmbengwa said. He last visited the building alone while campaigning in 2004. He has not gone inside since without an armed police escort, he said.
In 2007, the city seized the building, but could not make major changes. By law, housing is considered a human right. If the government wants to evict people, it must provide somewhere else for them to live.
Consecutive city redevelopment plans have failed over this issue. Municipal officials have proposed giving buildings to developers or city agencies that build affordable housing. But the city was unwilling or unable to build temporary housing for tenants who would be evicted during the renovations.
“They want to rescue the buildings,” said Nomzamo Zondo, a housing lawyer with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa. “They could not care less for the people.”
One reason for this deadlock is that politicians chafe at the idea of building housing for immigrants.
“The city does not have money to keep on building properties for the influx of all these foreigners,” said Shadrack Sibiya, who until recently led a government task force to address what are known as “hijacked” buildings — those taken over by criminals.
Officials say newcomers from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are overcrowding the city and straining its resources. But they have never provided data to support that argument. Immigrants do come to Johannesburg in large numbers, but so do migrants from rural South Africa. This is true in Vannin Court, where many of the tenants interviewed by reporters were South Africans.
The city’s property manager, the Johannesburg Property Company, contributes to the neglect. The agency is in charge of leasing and maintaining nearly 30,000 city properties but has become delinquent itself.
The agency is insolvent even though it is buttressed by municipal and provincial subsidies, according to its financial records. It resists scrutiny of its lease agreements, even by city officials and its own board of directors, according to former board members, ward councilors, and politicians who oversaw the department.
“We didn’t even know how many buildings we actually owned as the city,” said Mpho Phalatse, a former mayor.
The agency’s chief executive, Helen Botes, was suspended twice in the last three years. A federal anti-corruption unit found that she authorized spending millions on questionable cleaning contracts during the coronavirus pandemic without the board’s approval. A separate internal investigation accused her agency of spending millions to house its finance department in a different municipality, despite the city’s vast portfolio.
In interviews, former Johannesburg Property Company board members described a culture of intimidation and retribution. Former board members said Ms. Botes and her executives kept information from them about agency operations. But Ms. Botes, a civil servant, has outlasted 10 mayors.
“It’s meant to be chaotic,” said Brenda Madumise, a former board chairwoman, “so that then there is money that disappears into people’s pockets.”
The Johannesburg Property Company also owned and was supposed to maintain the building at 80 Albert Street. When officials visited the building in 2019, according to records and officials, they noted the flammable makeshift partitions, the obstructed fire exits, the shacks on the roof and the rats on every floor. But nobody returned to fix the issues, nor did anyone try to wrest control from the criminals who were illegally collecting rent.
Ms. Botes and the property agency did not respond to requests for comment, referring questions to the city manager. A spokesman for the city manager did not respond, either.
The same neglect extended to Vannin Court. In 2019, the Johannesburg Property Company contracted with a private developer to renovate the building and turn it into mixed-income apartments. A tenant survey was conducted and a security contractor installed turnstiles to monitor who came and went. Architects measured the interior and drew plans.
But the project stalled for familiar reasons. The city made no concrete plans to house the tenants. Ultimately, the developer ran out of money. Both the security company and the architect said they had gone unpaid.
In the immediate aftermath of the Albert Street fire, two city officials turned the tragedy into a political talking point: Mr. Kunene, who spoke to reporters before the Vannin Court raid and is in charge of the transportation system; and Mgcini Tshwaku, who oversees public safety. They framed the fire in terms of immigration. (The mayor, a political novice from a small party, appeared at a few public events but was overshadowed by Mr. Kunene and Mr. Tshwaku.)
In just over a week, they raided six buildings and, in one case, evicted tenants without a court order and welded shut the entrance to one building. They dared judges to visit the buildings themselves before overturning evictions, and vilified the human-rights lawyers who bring such cases. They blamed immigrants as the cause of crime and blight. During the raid at Vannin Court in September, they noted that they’d earned the nickname “the destruction boys.”
But as media attention on the fire faded, so did the raids. Politicians turned to other subjects. “I am tired,” said Mr. Tshwaku, as he walked away from his last raid in September.
Many of the survivors of the Albert Street fire have moved into nearby derelict buildings.
A public inquiry into the cause of the fire has stalled. The venue for the hearings, it turned out, did not meet basic safety standards. The city’s emergency services agency considered it a fire hazard.
About the data
The New York Times gathered the underlying data from documents from the Johannesburg Property Company, past city administrations, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association, and other records shared with The Times. The Times verified the data by visiting the buildings and, in some cases, interviewing tenants and other people. The catalog includes buildings that met five or more of the following criteria: violation of fire safety codes (no functional fire escape or extinguishers, blocked fire exits, flammable partitions such as shacks built indoors or on roofs and basements, or residents burning open fires indoors); no basic services such as electricity, water or waste collection; clear signs of structural problems; damage from past fires; unrestricted access through the main door; and signs of overcrowding. Reporters verified ownership and other information through the
Johannesburg GIS system
.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
|
Deadly Fire in Africa’s Richest City Exposed a Secret in Plain Sight
Officials blame immigrants and liberal housing laws, but a Times investigation found the entrenched problems that turned downtown Johannesburg into a blighted tinderbox.
Nov. 10, 2023
Days after the fire, officials in Johannesburg reached for a well-worn script. They gathered the media for a made-for-television police raid.
The blaze had swept through a government property at 80 Albert Street, a deathtrap of a building where squatters pilfered electricity, built indoor shacks out of cardboard and cooked on paraffin stoves. The authorities could do nothing there except sift through the ashes.
So instead, they turned their attention to another government-owned property, Vannin Court. It’s an eight-story building where hundreds of people live without running water or power.
“When people die in these buildings, it is the city of Johannesburg that gets blamed,” Kenny Kunene, a city official, told TV cameras minutes before the raid began. “Now we are going to save the lives of our people.”
Police cars surrounded the building and officials barged inside to find trash clogging the elevator shaft three floors deep
|
. A bathtub sat full of rancid water. Mattresses were wedged into unusable bathrooms. The building choked with cooking smells, decaying trash and human waste. One apartment frequently catches fire, but the stairs on the fire escape were sawed off and sold as scrap long ago.
Johannesburg officials have publicly blamed immigrants and progressive housing laws for the large number of dilapidated buildings like this. But a New York Times investigation found that for decades, multiple governments and political parties have ignored the problem. Financial records show that the city’s property management agency is insolvent, despite holding thousands of properties, including some in the wealthiest sections of the city. The agency, which has been dogged for years by corruption allegations, does not have an audited list of its holdings. Some low-level municipal officials have capitalized on this by illegally collecting rent from squatters, according to multiple current and former city officials.
The city government has effectively abandoned its downtown housing stock, following in the footsteps of many private landlords who have deserted their buildings. Armed men, desperate families and opportunistic squatters have moved in, creating vertical slums in full view of the government.
Despite the many hazards — fire, crime and more — that come with such widespread neglect, officials from the property agency and the mayor’s office have failed for years to even catalog the city’s dilapidated buildings, the first step in averting future disaster.
In response to the fire, Times reporters compiled a list of derelict buildings in central Johannesburg. They reviewed internal city government records, combed housing lawsuits and consulted a document from a lawyer representing landlords. Reporters then visited the buildings and interviewed tenants and others to confirm the data.
The Times count is conservative in a city where whole blocks are blighted by decay and bear the unmistakable signs of illegal and unsafe occupation.
The cause of the 80 Albert Street inferno remains unknown, but these buildings are so dangerous that another tragedy appears inevitable. Within four weeks of the Albert Street blaze, fires broke out in three other dilapidated buildings, leaving dozens of people homeless.
“There are buildings where it would be safer to be on the street than to live in that building,” said Greg Vermaak, a lawyer who represented the city in the early 2000s and now works for private landlords.
Vannin Court was one of several buildings targeted by police raids in the fire’s aftermath. The stated plan was to inspect and perhaps clear them to prevent the next disaster. But nothing would change.
The residents who milled around, watching the spectacle, knew it. So did the officials. After all, the city had failed to fix the building for nearly two decades, despite numerous other raids. In fact, this was the second raid in about five months.
Vannin Court followed a familiar path to despair. In the early 1990s, as white families fled downtown Johannesburg, banks redlined the neighborhood, refusing to lend money there. Real estate values tanked, discouraging investment from landlords who suddenly struggled to find paying tenants.
Utility bills went unpaid, and eventually the city cut off power and water. That is when armed men moved in, according to Masindi Cabrali Mmbengwa, a ward councilor who represents the neighborhood.
The men controlled apartment units, charged rent and used the building as a hideaway, according to the police.
“It became a no-go area,” Mr. Mmbengwa said. He last visited the building alone while campaigning in 2004. He has not gone inside since without an armed police escort, he said.
In 2007, the city seized the building, but could not make major changes. By law, housing is considered a human right. If the government wants to evict people, it must provide somewhere else for them to live.
Consecutive city redevelopment plans have failed over this issue. Municipal officials have proposed giving buildings to developers or city agencies that build affordable housing. But the city was unwilling or unable to build temporary housing for tenants who would be evicted during the renovations.
“They want to rescue the buildings,” said Nomzamo Zondo, a housing lawyer with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa. “They could not care less for the people.”
One reason for this deadlock is that politicians chafe at the idea of building housing for immigrants.
“The city does not have money to keep on building properties for the influx of all these foreigners,” said Shadrack Sibiya, who until recently led a government task force to address what are known as “hijacked” buildings — those taken over by criminals.
Officials say newcomers from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are overcrowding the city and straining its resources. But they have never provided data to support that argument. Immigrants do come to Johannesburg in large numbers, but so do migrants from rural South Africa. This is true in Vannin Court, where many of the tenants interviewed by reporters were South Africans.
The city’s property manager, the Johannesburg Property Company, contributes to the neglect. The agency is in charge of leasing and maintaining nearly 30,000 city properties but has become delinquent itself.
The agency is insolvent even though it is buttressed by municipal and provincial subsidies, according to its financial records. It resists scrutiny of its lease agreements, even by city officials and its own board of directors, according to former board members, ward councilors, and politicians who oversaw the department.
“We didn’t even know how many buildings we actually owned as the city,” said Mpho Phalatse, a former mayor.
The agency’s chief executive, Helen Botes, was suspended twice in the last three years. A federal anti-corruption unit found that she authorized spending millions on questionable cleaning contracts during the coronavirus pandemic without the board’s approval. A separate internal investigation accused her agency of spending millions to house its finance department in a different municipality, despite the city’s vast portfolio.
In interviews, former Johannesburg Property Company board members described a culture of intimidation and retribution. Former board members said Ms. Botes and her executives kept information from them about agency operations. But Ms. Botes, a civil servant, has outlasted 10 mayors.
“It’s meant to be chaotic,” said Brenda Madumise, a former board chairwoman, “so that then there is money that disappears into people’s pockets.”
The Johannesburg Property Company also owned and was supposed to maintain the building at 80 Albert Street. When officials visited the building in 2019, according to records and officials, they noted the flammable makeshift partitions, the obstructed fire exits, the shacks on the roof and the rats on every floor. But nobody returned to fix the issues, nor did anyone try to wrest control from the criminals who were illegally collecting rent.
Ms. Botes and the property agency did not respond to requests for comment, referring questions to the city manager. A spokesman for the city manager did not respond, either.
The same neglect extended to Vannin Court. In 2019, the Johannesburg Property Company contracted with a private developer to renovate the building and turn it into mixed-income apartments. A tenant survey was conducted and a security contractor installed turnstiles to monitor who came and went. Architects measured the interior and drew plans.
But the project stalled for familiar reasons. The city made no concrete plans to house the tenants. Ultimately, the developer ran out of money. Both the security company and the architect said they had gone unpaid.
In the immediate aftermath of the Albert Street fire, two city officials turned the tragedy into a political talking point: Mr. Kunene, who spoke to reporters before the Vannin Court raid and is in charge of the transportation system; and Mgcini Tshwaku, who oversees public safety. They framed the fire in terms of immigration. (The mayor, a political novice from a small party, appeared at a few public events but was overshadowed by Mr. Kunene and Mr. Tshwaku.)
In just over a week, they raided six buildings and, in one case, evicted tenants without a court order and welded shut the entrance to one building. They dared judges to visit the buildings themselves before overturning evictions, and vilified the human-rights lawyers who bring such cases. They blamed immigrants as the cause of crime and blight. During the raid at Vannin Court in September, they noted that they’d earned the nickname “the destruction boys.”
But as media attention on the fire faded, so did the raids. Politicians turned to other subjects. “I am tired,” said Mr. Tshwaku, as he walked away from his last raid in September.
Many of the survivors of the Albert Street fire have moved into nearby derelict buildings.
A public inquiry into the cause of the fire has stalled. The venue for the hearings, it turned out, did not meet basic safety standards. The city’s emergency services agency considered it a fire hazard.
About the data
The New York Times gathered the underlying data from documents from the Johannesburg Property Company, past city administrations, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association, and other records shared with The Times. The Times verified the data by visiting the buildings and, in some cases, interviewing tenants and other people. The catalog includes buildings that met five or more of the following criteria: violation of fire safety codes (no functional fire escape or extinguishers, blocked fire exits, flammable partitions such as shacks built indoors or on roofs and basements, or residents burning open fires indoors); no basic services such as electricity, water or waste collection; clear signs of structural problems; damage from past fires; unrestricted access through the main door; and signs of overcrowding. Reporters verified ownership and other information through the
Johannesburg GIS system
.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
|
d2c619ea-1108-4284-a538-fc247a5f0c01
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/theater/seven-brides-for-seven-brothers-lawsuit.html
|
He Made ‘Seven Brides’ Less Sexist. But Can He Stage It?
|
2023-12-14
|
nytimes
|
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” features a central plot twist that makes the story problematic for contemporary audiences: A group of ill-mannered brothers kidnaps the women they have been eyeing.
The plot device goes back all the way to ancient times, when it was the theme of a Roman legend called “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” That story inspired paintings (Rubens, et al.), a short story (“The Sobbin’ Women”) and
a 1954 musical film
later adapted into a 1982 stage musical, which closed on Broadway three days after it opened.
Now, an effort to modernize the story to make it palatable for today’s theatergoers has landed in court.
The dispute centers on a version of the show that was
staged in 2021
in St. Louis
at the Muny
, one of the nation’s biggest musical theater venues. For that staging, David Landay, the only one of the 1982 show’s four writers who is alive, added a prologue and revised the plot so that the women foil the kidnapping attempt but, bored with life in their small town, opt to flee voluntarily with their would-be abductors.
Landay hoped there would be more productions to breathe new life into a tired title.
But according to a lawsuit filed this week in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the heirs of his deceased collaborators, Al Kasha, Lawrence Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, would not agree to productions beyond the one at the Muny. Landay, represented by Lita Beth Wright, argues in the lawsuit that the heirs are breaching their contract with him by unreasonably withholding their consent.
Although it was
a flop on Broadway
, the original musical is admired by some for a few songs and its exuberant dance numbers. An outdoor production in London in 2015 received mostly positive reviews, although with qualifiers, like the one
in The Standard
: “some of the most dubious gender politics — and there’s a lot to choose from — in musical theater.”
So when Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer, thought about staging the show during a pandemic summer (the Muny’s shows are outdoors), he was clear about the conditions. The story would have to be revised.
“The criteria I have is that if there’s a woman sitting there with her daughter, what is it that they’re receiving,” he said in an interview, adding that the female characters in the original version were “guileless and passive.”
He added: “It’s one of those shows that audiences love and have great affection for, but when you look at it, it’s really challenging to do now — in the original version, there are not a lot of good choices being made. The music is gorgeous, and the barn dancing is epic, and there’s a decent love story for the two leading characters, but it’s one of those shows that belongs to another era.”
In the lawsuit, Landay, who wrote the original book with Lawrence Kasha, is seeking at least $250,000 in damages as well as the right to pursue future productions of the revised version.
“Because of #MeToo it had become outdated,” he said in an interview. “Before that, it was done all over the world.” He added, “The version I came up with, now I want to get it out there so people can enjoy it.”
The defendants could not be reached for comment.
|
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” features a central plot twist that makes the story problematic for contemporary audiences: A group of ill-mannered brothers kidnaps the women they have been eyeing.
The plot device goes back all the way to ancient times, when it was the theme of a Roman legend called “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” That story inspired paintings (Rubens, et al.), a short story (“The Sobbin’ Women”) and
a 1954 musical film
later adapted into a 1982 stage musical, which closed on Broadway three days after it opened.
Now, an effort to modernize the story to make it palatable for today’s theatergoers has landed in court.
The dispute centers on a version of the show that was
staged in 2021
in St. Louis
at the Muny
, one of the nation’s biggest musical theater venues. For that staging, David Landay, the only one of the 1982 show’s four writers who is alive, added a prologue and revised the plot so that the women foil the kidnapping attempt but, bored with life in their small town, opt to flee voluntarily with their would-be abductors
|
.
Landay hoped there would be more productions to breathe new life into a tired title.
But according to a lawsuit filed this week in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the heirs of his deceased collaborators, Al Kasha, Lawrence Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, would not agree to productions beyond the one at the Muny. Landay, represented by Lita Beth Wright, argues in the lawsuit that the heirs are breaching their contract with him by unreasonably withholding their consent.
Although it was
a flop on Broadway
, the original musical is admired by some for a few songs and its exuberant dance numbers. An outdoor production in London in 2015 received mostly positive reviews, although with qualifiers, like the one
in The Standard
: “some of the most dubious gender politics — and there’s a lot to choose from — in musical theater.”
So when Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer, thought about staging the show during a pandemic summer (the Muny’s shows are outdoors), he was clear about the conditions. The story would have to be revised.
“The criteria I have is that if there’s a woman sitting there with her daughter, what is it that they’re receiving,” he said in an interview, adding that the female characters in the original version were “guileless and passive.”
He added: “It’s one of those shows that audiences love and have great affection for, but when you look at it, it’s really challenging to do now — in the original version, there are not a lot of good choices being made. The music is gorgeous, and the barn dancing is epic, and there’s a decent love story for the two leading characters, but it’s one of those shows that belongs to another era.”
In the lawsuit, Landay, who wrote the original book with Lawrence Kasha, is seeking at least $250,000 in damages as well as the right to pursue future productions of the revised version.
“Because of #MeToo it had become outdated,” he said in an interview. “Before that, it was done all over the world.” He added, “The version I came up with, now I want to get it out there so people can enjoy it.”
The defendants could not be reached for comment.
|
15b86af2-d82f-435d-8553-7185812fe791
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/us/divisions-israel-gaza-netanyahu-hostages.html
|
Divisions Emerging in Israel Over Gaza War
|
2024-01-19
|
nytimes
|
After nearly 15 weeks of war, sharp divisions within Israel over the path forward in the Gaza Strip are increasingly coming into the open.
A member of Israel’s war cabinet, a general who lost a son in the conflict, urged in a television interview broadcast late Thursday that the country pursue an extended cease-fire with Hamas to free the remaining hostages, a rebuke of the “total victory” being pursued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And in a sign of the growing exasperation among parts of the Israeli public over the government’s failure to free the hostages, relatives and supporters of the captives partially blocked traffic on a major highway in Tel Aviv before dawn on Friday.
Israel’s emergency governing coalition is under intense and competing pressures as the war drags on. Right-wing politicians are urging the military to act more aggressively in Gaza, even while Israel is contending with outrage across the globe over the carnage and decimation of so much of the territory. At the same time, the families of hostages are urging concessions to secure their return.
Divisions between Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are also increasingly on display. Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday appeared to rule out a long-stated goal of U.S. foreign policy: a postwar peace process that would lead to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.
“Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a news conference on Thursday, referring to an area including occupied territory that Palestinians hope will one day become their independent state. “This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel,” he said.
President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Friday in their first conversation in nearly a month, as the two leaders increasingly diverge over the conduct of the war and the future of Gaza once the fighting ends.
The White House confirmed the call in a brief statement, saying only that the two leaders spoke “to discuss the latest developments in Israel and Gaza.” And in Yemen, the U.S. military hit three Houthi missiles and launchers, John F. Kirby, a spokesman for National Security Council, told reporters on Friday, a pattern of strikes that the White House says will continue until the militant group halts its attacks on Red Sea shipping.
The Israeli official who criticized the prosecution of the war, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, a retired military chief of staff, has laid bare some of the persistent tensions within the wartime government. General Eisenkot said Israel’s leaders must define a vision for how to wind down the war in Gaza, and for its desired outcome. Only a deal with Hamas would secure the release of the hostages, he said, adding that Israel had so far failed in its stated aim of destroying Hamas. More than 240 people were taken hostage on Oct. 7, and about 130 people remain captives in Gaza.
“We didn’t topple Hamas,” General Eisenkot told Uvda, an Israeli news program, in a prerecorded interview. “The situation in Gaza is such that the war aims have yet to be achieved.”
General Eisenkot’s views carry weight in Israel in part because of the personal price he has paid in the war: His 25-year-old son, Master Sgt. Gal Meir Eisenkot, was
killed while fighting in Gaza
last month, as was a nephew.
Throughout the hourlong broadcast, he appeared to come down on the side of making a deal to liberate the hostages, even if Israel had to accept an extended truce with Hamas. He lamented that a weeklong cease-fire last November, during which groups of hostages were released daily in exchange for imprisoned Palestinians, had lapsed because he said reaching a similar arrangement a second time would be difficult.
Since the beginning of the conflict, at least 25 hostages have been killed in captivity, according to Israeli officials, including at least one in a botched rescue attempt. In December, soldiers
misidentified three hostages
as combatants and fatally shot them.
General Eisenkot said that a heroic rescue mission — like the
1976 Entebbe raid
in which Israeli commandos saved the lives of 103 people aboard a hijacked plane in Uganda — “won’t happen” because the hostages were scattered and mostly being held underground.
Tamir Pardo, a former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, echoed General Eisenkot’s message in a televised interview Friday evening. Those in Israel speaking about bringing back the hostages while simultaneously eliminating Hamas were “shamelessly lying,” he said.
Though there is broad-based support among Israelis for the Gaza campaign, many have become increasingly exasperated by the lack of progress by Mr. Netanyahu’s government in bringing the hostages home.
At a news conference on Thursday, some relatives of captives accused Israel’s war cabinet of dragging its feet, and called on the government to hammer out an international deal for the hostages. “Stop lying to us,” said Shir Siegel, whose 64-year-old father, Keith Siegel, is among the hostages. “You’re not doing everything you can.”
Underlining the divisions in the war cabinet, General Eisenkot said Mr. Netanyahu carried “sharp and clear” responsibility for the country’s failure to protect its citizens on Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led assault. He urged a new election “within months.”
Although elections could threaten wartime unity, “the Israeli public’s lack of faith in its government is no less dire,” he said.
As Israel’s internal debate has grown louder, a range of world leaders have sounded rising alarm about the suffering of civilians in Gaza and the death toll there, which now exceeds 24,000, according to Gazan health officials.
A top official of Unicef, the U.N. children’s fund, said in
a statement
Thursday that the conditions there were “some of the most horrific” he had ever seen, describing badly injured children enduring surgeries in dangerous circumstances.
“Unicef has described the Gaza Strip as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” said the official, Ted Chaiban, the agency’s deputy executive director. “We have said this is a war on children. But these truths do not seem to be getting through.”
Mr. Chaiban said his recent three-day trip to Gaza included a visit to Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military says it is trying to crush a Hamas stronghold. The hospital has been
deluged by people
wounded in airstrikes, and scores of people who were sheltering there
have fled in recent days
as fighting rages around the complex.
He described meeting a child at the hospital whose spleen had been removed after shrapnel sliced through her abdomen. The spleen plays an important role in the body’s immune system, so the child has to recover in isolation, Mr. Chaiban said, because she is in “a war zone full of disease and infection.”
A 13-year-old at the hospital, Mr. Chaiban said, had developed gangrene from a hand injury and had to undergo an operation to amputate his arm — without anesthesia.
The United Nations has described dire conditions in the enclave, with water scarce, sanitation poor and many children malnourished and sick. Only 15 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partly functional, according to the World Health Organization, which has said that Nasser hospital alone treated 700 patients on Monday, more than double its typical caseload.
Nadav Gavrielov and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
|
After nearly 15 weeks of war, sharp divisions within Israel over the path forward in the Gaza Strip are increasingly coming into the open.
A member of Israel’s war cabinet, a general who lost a son in the conflict, urged in a television interview broadcast late Thursday that the country pursue an extended cease-fire with Hamas to free the remaining hostages, a rebuke of the “total victory” being pursued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And in a sign of the growing exasperation among parts of the Israeli public over the government’s failure to free the hostages, relatives and supporters of the captives partially blocked traffic on a major highway in Tel Aviv before dawn on Friday.
Israel’s emergency governing coalition is under intense and competing pressures as the war drags on. Right-wing politicians are urging the military to act more aggressively in Gaza, even while Israel is contending with outrage across the globe over the carnage and decimation of so much of the territory. At the same time, the families of hostages are urging concessions to secure their return.
Divisions between Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are also increasingly on display. Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday appeared to rule out a long-stated goal of U.S.
|
foreign policy: a postwar peace process that would lead to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.
“Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a news conference on Thursday, referring to an area including occupied territory that Palestinians hope will one day become their independent state. “This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel,” he said.
President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Friday in their first conversation in nearly a month, as the two leaders increasingly diverge over the conduct of the war and the future of Gaza once the fighting ends.
The White House confirmed the call in a brief statement, saying only that the two leaders spoke “to discuss the latest developments in Israel and Gaza.” And in Yemen, the U.S. military hit three Houthi missiles and launchers, John F. Kirby, a spokesman for National Security Council, told reporters on Friday, a pattern of strikes that the White House says will continue until the militant group halts its attacks on Red Sea shipping.
The Israeli official who criticized the prosecution of the war, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, a retired military chief of staff, has laid bare some of the persistent tensions within the wartime government. General Eisenkot said Israel’s leaders must define a vision for how to wind down the war in Gaza, and for its desired outcome. Only a deal with Hamas would secure the release of the hostages, he said, adding that Israel had so far failed in its stated aim of destroying Hamas. More than 240 people were taken hostage on Oct. 7, and about 130 people remain captives in Gaza.
“We didn’t topple Hamas,” General Eisenkot told Uvda, an Israeli news program, in a prerecorded interview. “The situation in Gaza is such that the war aims have yet to be achieved.”
General Eisenkot’s views carry weight in Israel in part because of the personal price he has paid in the war: His 25-year-old son, Master Sgt. Gal Meir Eisenkot, was
killed while fighting in Gaza
last month, as was a nephew.
Throughout the hourlong broadcast, he appeared to come down on the side of making a deal to liberate the hostages, even if Israel had to accept an extended truce with Hamas. He lamented that a weeklong cease-fire last November, during which groups of hostages were released daily in exchange for imprisoned Palestinians, had lapsed because he said reaching a similar arrangement a second time would be difficult.
Since the beginning of the conflict, at least 25 hostages have been killed in captivity, according to Israeli officials, including at least one in a botched rescue attempt. In December, soldiers
misidentified three hostages
as combatants and fatally shot them.
General Eisenkot said that a heroic rescue mission — like the
1976 Entebbe raid
in which Israeli commandos saved the lives of 103 people aboard a hijacked plane in Uganda — “won’t happen” because the hostages were scattered and mostly being held underground.
Tamir Pardo, a former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, echoed General Eisenkot’s message in a televised interview Friday evening. Those in Israel speaking about bringing back the hostages while simultaneously eliminating Hamas were “shamelessly lying,” he said.
Though there is broad-based support among Israelis for the Gaza campaign, many have become increasingly exasperated by the lack of progress by Mr. Netanyahu’s government in bringing the hostages home.
At a news conference on Thursday, some relatives of captives accused Israel’s war cabinet of dragging its feet, and called on the government to hammer out an international deal for the hostages. “Stop lying to us,” said Shir Siegel, whose 64-year-old father, Keith Siegel, is among the hostages. “You’re not doing everything you can.”
Underlining the divisions in the war cabinet, General Eisenkot said Mr. Netanyahu carried “sharp and clear” responsibility for the country’s failure to protect its citizens on Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led assault. He urged a new election “within months.”
Although elections could threaten wartime unity, “the Israeli public’s lack of faith in its government is no less dire,” he said.
As Israel’s internal debate has grown louder, a range of world leaders have sounded rising alarm about the suffering of civilians in Gaza and the death toll there, which now exceeds 24,000, according to Gazan health officials.
A top official of Unicef, the U.N. children’s fund, said in
a statement
Thursday that the conditions there were “some of the most horrific” he had ever seen, describing badly injured children enduring surgeries in dangerous circumstances.
“Unicef has described the Gaza Strip as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” said the official, Ted Chaiban, the agency’s deputy executive director. “We have said this is a war on children. But these truths do not seem to be getting through.”
Mr. Chaiban said his recent three-day trip to Gaza included a visit to Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military says it is trying to crush a Hamas stronghold. The hospital has been
deluged by people
wounded in airstrikes, and scores of people who were sheltering there
have fled in recent days
as fighting rages around the complex.
He described meeting a child at the hospital whose spleen had been removed after shrapnel sliced through her abdomen. The spleen plays an important role in the body’s immune system, so the child has to recover in isolation, Mr. Chaiban said, because she is in “a war zone full of disease and infection.”
A 13-year-old at the hospital, Mr. Chaiban said, had developed gangrene from a hand injury and had to undergo an operation to amputate his arm — without anesthesia.
The United Nations has described dire conditions in the enclave, with water scarce, sanitation poor and many children malnourished and sick. Only 15 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partly functional, according to the World Health Organization, which has said that Nasser hospital alone treated 700 patients on Monday, more than double its typical caseload.
Nadav Gavrielov and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
|
9260d08a-3104-4fa2-b5c2-220f238a551a
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/nyregion/shootings-nyc-crime.html
|
Shootings in NYC Drop by 25 Percent as Surge of Violence Eases
|
2023-07-06
|
nytimes
|
Shootings in New York City dropped by about 25 percent through the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, extending a downward trend after a spike in violent crime during the pandemic.
The sharp drop, which mirrored similar decreases across the United States, came amid widespread fears about crime in the city, which officials have blamed for keeping workers and
suburbanites
cloistered in their homes.
At a briefing on Thursday, Edward Caban, the acting police commissioner, said that shootings had declined for 13 consecutive weeks. The numbers were released at the beginning of summer, when violence historically rises, but he said he was “confident” that the department’s positive streak would continue in the summer.
“It is no coincidence,” Mr. Caban said. “From the beginning of this administration, we made the fight against gun violence our top priority.”
Through Sunday, reports of five of the seven offenses that the Police Department ranks as major felonies had gone down, while two increased, police
data show
. Murders, rapes and burglaries decreased by about 10 percent each; robberies fell nearly 5 percent. But car thefts increased 18 percent and felony assaults by 6 percent.
Michael Lipetri, chief of crime control strategies, tied the increase in car thefts to the ease of stealing certain models of cars. “You could basically steal a Hyundai or a Kia in seconds,” he said on Thursday.
Transit crimes, which have overall fallen by nearly 4 percent this year, increased by about 19 percent over the past month compared to the same period last year, according to
Police Department data
. Officials did not shed light on the spike at the news conference.
Crime data is a “roller coaster,” said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School. Causality, he said, is “almost impossible to prove,” though police departments often take credit.
“Crime goes up, crime goes down, people are alarmed and the police department changes its tactics,” he said. “Whatever changes they’ve made, they don’t seem able to interrupt this cycle.”
“What they’re observing in New York is happening all over the country,” Mr. Fagan said.
At the beginning of last year, as the pandemic eased and people began returning to their routines, the city
struggled to stem
an increase in violence.
Mayor Eric Adams, whose tenure began in 2022, made reversing the trend, specifically reining in gun violence, a central goal. Mr. Adams appointed a “
gun violence czar
.” He also
expanded a jobs program
and
Saturday Night Lights
, which offers activities for children between the ages of 11 and 18.
But the crime-fighting approaches of Mr. Adams and the Police Department have also been met with criticism.
Last year, the department
announced an initiative
designed to enforce what they called quality-of-life crimes, focusing on things like public drinking, urination and disorderly groups.
Critics said
that the enforcement is a return to “broken windows” policing, the enforcement of low-level offenses in an effort to prevent more serious crimes, which they said results in harassment.
In June,
a court-appointed monitor found
that anti-crime units, then under the leadership of the former commissioner, Keechant Sewell, were still stopping, frisking and searching too many people, despite assurances from Mr. Adams that new policies and training would prevent the problem.
A report from The City
this week found that there had been a 600 percent increase in police vehicle pursuits in the year’s first three months.
For David Caba, vice president at Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence, the drop in gun violence that the department emphasized on Thursday reflects the work of social service organizations such as his.
Since the pandemic disruptions have ebbed, his teams, which operate in six zones within the Bronx, have seen shootings and homicides fall, he said. The zones are each made up of about 12 to 15 blocks that have grappled with high rates of violence. One zone has gone over a year without a single shooting or murder, he said.
“It takes everyone,” he said, adding: “It ain’t just one entity that’s going to come in and provide a remedy.”
|
Shootings in New York City dropped by about 25 percent through the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, extending a downward trend after a spike in violent crime during the pandemic.
The sharp drop, which mirrored similar decreases across the United States, came amid widespread fears about crime in the city, which officials have blamed for keeping workers and
suburbanites
cloistered in their homes.
At a briefing on Thursday, Edward Caban, the acting police commissioner, said that shootings had declined for 13 consecutive weeks. The numbers were released at the beginning of summer, when violence historically rises, but he said he was “confident” that the department’s positive streak would continue in the summer.
“It is no coincidence,” Mr. Caban said. “From the beginning of this administration, we made the fight against gun violence our top priority.”
Through Sunday, reports of five of the seven offenses that the Police Department ranks as major felonies had gone down, while two increased, police
data show
. Murders, rapes and burglaries decreased by about 10 percent each; robberies fell nearly 5 percent. But car thefts increased 18 percent and felony
|
assaults by 6 percent.
Michael Lipetri, chief of crime control strategies, tied the increase in car thefts to the ease of stealing certain models of cars. “You could basically steal a Hyundai or a Kia in seconds,” he said on Thursday.
Transit crimes, which have overall fallen by nearly 4 percent this year, increased by about 19 percent over the past month compared to the same period last year, according to
Police Department data
. Officials did not shed light on the spike at the news conference.
Crime data is a “roller coaster,” said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School. Causality, he said, is “almost impossible to prove,” though police departments often take credit.
“Crime goes up, crime goes down, people are alarmed and the police department changes its tactics,” he said. “Whatever changes they’ve made, they don’t seem able to interrupt this cycle.”
“What they’re observing in New York is happening all over the country,” Mr. Fagan said.
At the beginning of last year, as the pandemic eased and people began returning to their routines, the city
struggled to stem
an increase in violence.
Mayor Eric Adams, whose tenure began in 2022, made reversing the trend, specifically reining in gun violence, a central goal. Mr. Adams appointed a “
gun violence czar
.” He also
expanded a jobs program
and
Saturday Night Lights
, which offers activities for children between the ages of 11 and 18.
But the crime-fighting approaches of Mr. Adams and the Police Department have also been met with criticism.
Last year, the department
announced an initiative
designed to enforce what they called quality-of-life crimes, focusing on things like public drinking, urination and disorderly groups.
Critics said
that the enforcement is a return to “broken windows” policing, the enforcement of low-level offenses in an effort to prevent more serious crimes, which they said results in harassment.
In June,
a court-appointed monitor found
that anti-crime units, then under the leadership of the former commissioner, Keechant Sewell, were still stopping, frisking and searching too many people, despite assurances from Mr. Adams that new policies and training would prevent the problem.
A report from The City
this week found that there had been a 600 percent increase in police vehicle pursuits in the year’s first three months.
For David Caba, vice president at Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence, the drop in gun violence that the department emphasized on Thursday reflects the work of social service organizations such as his.
Since the pandemic disruptions have ebbed, his teams, which operate in six zones within the Bronx, have seen shootings and homicides fall, he said. The zones are each made up of about 12 to 15 blocks that have grappled with high rates of violence. One zone has gone over a year without a single shooting or murder, he said.
“It takes everyone,” he said, adding: “It ain’t just one entity that’s going to come in and provide a remedy.”
|
e12532ec-438e-481a-a559-394ee548b8d4
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/world/africa/sudan-generals-coup-civilian-rule.html
|
2 Generals Took Over Sudan. Will They Deliver Democracy or War?
|
2023-04-06
|
nytimes
|
KHARTOUM, Sudan — It’s not in Berlin, Jerusalem or along the southern U.S. border. But the long concrete wall that is rising in the heart of Sudan’s capital, snaking around the perimeter of its military headquarters, has, like other more famous barriers, come to symbolize the precarious divisions of a fractured country.
The wall cuts through what is hallowed ground for many Sudanese: the area where, four years ago, protesters massed at the military’s gates to demand
the ouster
of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the widely detested ruler of three decades. Their victory
brought euphoric hopes for a new Sudan
; Mr. Bashir was
consigned to a prison
by the Nile.
But the revolution was derailed 18 months ago when Sudan’s two most powerful generals joined forces
to seize power in a coup
. Since then, the country has slumped — its economy tanking and street protests continuing as
the two generals
struggled to impose their authority. And now they are fighting between themselves.
Alarmed foreign powers, led by the United Nations and the United States, have persuaded the generals to hand power back to the civilians — at least on paper — by April 11, the fourth anniversary of Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster.
But as talks have dragged on in recent days, tensions between the rival military camps have spiked. Anxieties soared on Wednesday when images of tanks crossing the Nile went viral on social media.
Now, nobody is sure if the two generals are going to lead the country back to democracy, or into a fight.
Two bosses is rarely a good idea. In Sudan it has been a disaster. What started as private sniping a year ago between the army chief, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, and a powerful paramilitary commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has exploded into open conflict. The two men have issued veiled threats against each other. They made competing trips to neighboring countries. And they are repositioning their military forces.
The capital, Khartoum, has become a hotbed of rumor and speculation. Anxious residents scan social media for videos and other clues to gauge the temperature of relations between the two generals, described by one foreign official as “a loveless marriage where they hate each other’s guts.” Rival camps of soldiers are posted across the city, marking each other like opposing sports players. Reports of late-night troop movements stoke fears that the shouting could turn to shooting.
Most residents, though, just feel trapped in limbo.
The coup cost Sudan dearly, depriving it of billions of dollars in foreign aid and debt forgiveness. Food prices have soared. The electricity cuts out frequently. A plunging currency means it takes a thick wad of bank notes to pay for a small meal.
Visiting a retired Sudanese diplomat one sweltering evening, he welcomed me in the gloom of a darkened home; the power was out again. Moments later his wife walked in, triumphantly brandishing a jerrycan. She had found fuel for their generator.
“We are hanging between the sky and the earth,” Saif Osman told me as he piloted his car through the capital’s shabby streets. A veterinarian in his sixties, Mr. Osman drives a cab to earn enough to feed his family. He warned me to hide my cellphone; street crime, once a rarity in Khartoum, is rising rapidly.
The wall has become a factor in the fight. When it started to to go up, about a year ago, many Sudanese saw it as an effort by the military to forestall another popular revolution. But now it’s viewed as a symbol of the divisions inside the military, not least by the protagonists themselves.
“Burhan built the wall to protect himself,” General Hamdan’s brother, Abdul Rahim Dagalo, told me one afternoon at his Khartoum villa, as he lounged on a gilt-edged sofa, eating from a small pot of honey. “He doesn’t care what happens outside the wall. He doesn’t care if the rest of the country burns.”
Mr. Dagalo is the deputy leader of the Rapid Support Forces, which stemmed from the notorious
Janjaweed militias
that terrorized the western region of Darfur in the 2000s. But now General Hamdan has made clear his ambition to lead the country, and he and his brothers insist that they are the country’s foremost defenders of democracy, eager for elections to take place.
“All we think about is protecting civilians,” Mr. Dagalo said.
In one of many reality-distorting shifts of Sudanese politics today, General Hamdan has allied with civilian politicians who once viewed him as a bitter enemy. He has called the 2021 coup a “
mistake
.” But for others, General Hamdan’s ambitions should stop at the suspected mass grave on the edge of the city.
Investigators identified the site, at the foot of a mountain beside an old cemetery, in 2020, during the search for the missing bodies of at least 50 protesters killed by the security forces a year earlier, in June 2019, in one of the most notorious massacres of recent years. Witnesses blamed the killings on General Hamdan’s R.S.F. paramilitaries, and some said they saw his brother, Mr. Dagalo, on the scene.
To uncover the truth, the U.S. government hired a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists, specialists in exhuming mass graves, who traveled to Khartoum in 2021, joined by human rights experts from Columbia Law School. After visiting the suspected mass grave, and reviewing satellite images from the area and bloodstained clothes and bullet cases found nearby, the experts drew up detailed plans to excavate the site.
But with the coup in November 2021, everything stopped. “There’s no political will for it,” El Tayab Al Abbasi, a senior lawyer heading the investigation, told me. “This is the price of the coup.”
The sparring generals are just the most prominent actors in a bewildering constellation of forces — rebels and revolutionaries; Islamists and communists; business tycoons and stalwarts of the deposed Bashir regime — that are competing to shape Sudan’s future.
Foreign powers are meddling, too.
Egypt, the old colonial power, has sided with General Burhan and the army. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which see Sudan as a future source of food, have allies on both sides. The United States and European countries are leading the push for democracy — in part to fend off the Russians, who covet Sudan’s gold and seek access to its Red Sea ports for Russian warships.
Still, Sudan can be a tricky country for foreigners.
One afternoon I came across a group of Russian gold miners, wearing T-shirts and flip-flops, at a compound in central Khartoum. They worked for Wagner, the private military group that has spearheaded Russia’s drive into Africa in recent years.
But they seemed lost; their mine had been shuttered, and 40 of them had been detained on suspicion of smuggling. Nobody seemed sure why. “It’s politics,” their lawyer, Huweda Mursal, said, without explanation.
As the generals duke it out, many of the idealistic young Sudanese who helped topple Mr. al-Bashir in 2019 are sitting it out this time.
On the weekend, street photographers hustle for customers by the Nile at sunset, offering portraits for a dollar a pop. They take images of swaggering young men or young couples in Instagrammable poses by the storied river.
One photographer, Walid Abdul Karim, 22, an art student, said he once believed the fall of Mr. al-Bashir would open the door to “all good things — freedom, a better economy, hope.” He shrugged. “Now we realized that it just made a mess.”
But for others, the battered dream of a better Sudan lives on.
At a small cafe in Bahri, a bustling neighborhood north of the Nile, young men and women clustered over small cups of coffee. They belonged to “Anger Without Limits,” a group of hard core protesters leading the weekly clashes with the security forces. The risks are considerable. Scrolling through phones, several pointed to smiling pictures of dead friends — some of the 125 people killed, and 8,000 injured, since the coup.
On the day I left Khartoum they were out again, on streets covered in broken bricks and swathed in tear gas. As my flight climbed over the city, inky plumes of smoke billowed from the bridge that leads to Bahri — the fires lit by young Sudanese who insist they will never accept the rule, or the power games, of their generals.
|
KHARTOUM, Sudan — It’s not in Berlin, Jerusalem or along the southern U.S. border. But the long concrete wall that is rising in the heart of Sudan’s capital, snaking around the perimeter of its military headquarters, has, like other more famous barriers, come to symbolize the precarious divisions of a fractured country.
The wall cuts through what is hallowed ground for many Sudanese: the area where, four years ago, protesters massed at the military’s gates to demand
the ouster
of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the widely detested ruler of three decades. Their victory
brought euphoric hopes for a new Sudan
; Mr. Bashir was
consigned to a prison
by the Nile.
But the revolution was derailed 18 months ago when Sudan’s two most powerful generals joined forces
to seize power in a coup
. Since then, the country has slumped — its economy tanking and street protests continuing as
the two generals
struggled to impose their authority. And now they are fighting between themselves.
Alarmed foreign powers, led by the United Nations and the United States, have persuaded the generals to hand power back to the civilians — at
|
least on paper — by April 11, the fourth anniversary of Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster.
But as talks have dragged on in recent days, tensions between the rival military camps have spiked. Anxieties soared on Wednesday when images of tanks crossing the Nile went viral on social media.
Now, nobody is sure if the two generals are going to lead the country back to democracy, or into a fight.
Two bosses is rarely a good idea. In Sudan it has been a disaster. What started as private sniping a year ago between the army chief, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, and a powerful paramilitary commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has exploded into open conflict. The two men have issued veiled threats against each other. They made competing trips to neighboring countries. And they are repositioning their military forces.
The capital, Khartoum, has become a hotbed of rumor and speculation. Anxious residents scan social media for videos and other clues to gauge the temperature of relations between the two generals, described by one foreign official as “a loveless marriage where they hate each other’s guts.” Rival camps of soldiers are posted across the city, marking each other like opposing sports players. Reports of late-night troop movements stoke fears that the shouting could turn to shooting.
Most residents, though, just feel trapped in limbo.
The coup cost Sudan dearly, depriving it of billions of dollars in foreign aid and debt forgiveness. Food prices have soared. The electricity cuts out frequently. A plunging currency means it takes a thick wad of bank notes to pay for a small meal.
Visiting a retired Sudanese diplomat one sweltering evening, he welcomed me in the gloom of a darkened home; the power was out again. Moments later his wife walked in, triumphantly brandishing a jerrycan. She had found fuel for their generator.
“We are hanging between the sky and the earth,” Saif Osman told me as he piloted his car through the capital’s shabby streets. A veterinarian in his sixties, Mr. Osman drives a cab to earn enough to feed his family. He warned me to hide my cellphone; street crime, once a rarity in Khartoum, is rising rapidly.
The wall has become a factor in the fight. When it started to to go up, about a year ago, many Sudanese saw it as an effort by the military to forestall another popular revolution. But now it’s viewed as a symbol of the divisions inside the military, not least by the protagonists themselves.
“Burhan built the wall to protect himself,” General Hamdan’s brother, Abdul Rahim Dagalo, told me one afternoon at his Khartoum villa, as he lounged on a gilt-edged sofa, eating from a small pot of honey. “He doesn’t care what happens outside the wall. He doesn’t care if the rest of the country burns.”
Mr. Dagalo is the deputy leader of the Rapid Support Forces, which stemmed from the notorious
Janjaweed militias
that terrorized the western region of Darfur in the 2000s. But now General Hamdan has made clear his ambition to lead the country, and he and his brothers insist that they are the country’s foremost defenders of democracy, eager for elections to take place.
“All we think about is protecting civilians,” Mr. Dagalo said.
In one of many reality-distorting shifts of Sudanese politics today, General Hamdan has allied with civilian politicians who once viewed him as a bitter enemy. He has called the 2021 coup a “
mistake
.” But for others, General Hamdan’s ambitions should stop at the suspected mass grave on the edge of the city.
Investigators identified the site, at the foot of a mountain beside an old cemetery, in 2020, during the search for the missing bodies of at least 50 protesters killed by the security forces a year earlier, in June 2019, in one of the most notorious massacres of recent years. Witnesses blamed the killings on General Hamdan’s R.S.F. paramilitaries, and some said they saw his brother, Mr. Dagalo, on the scene.
To uncover the truth, the U.S. government hired a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists, specialists in exhuming mass graves, who traveled to Khartoum in 2021, joined by human rights experts from Columbia Law School. After visiting the suspected mass grave, and reviewing satellite images from the area and bloodstained clothes and bullet cases found nearby, the experts drew up detailed plans to excavate the site.
But with the coup in November 2021, everything stopped. “There’s no political will for it,” El Tayab Al Abbasi, a senior lawyer heading the investigation, told me. “This is the price of the coup.”
The sparring generals are just the most prominent actors in a bewildering constellation of forces — rebels and revolutionaries; Islamists and communists; business tycoons and stalwarts of the deposed Bashir regime — that are competing to shape Sudan’s future.
Foreign powers are meddling, too.
Egypt, the old colonial power, has sided with General Burhan and the army. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which see Sudan as a future source of food, have allies on both sides. The United States and European countries are leading the push for democracy — in part to fend off the Russians, who covet Sudan’s gold and seek access to its Red Sea ports for Russian warships.
Still, Sudan can be a tricky country for foreigners.
One afternoon I came across a group of Russian gold miners, wearing T-shirts and flip-flops, at a compound in central Khartoum. They worked for Wagner, the private military group that has spearheaded Russia’s drive into Africa in recent years.
But they seemed lost; their mine had been shuttered, and 40 of them had been detained on suspicion of smuggling. Nobody seemed sure why. “It’s politics,” their lawyer, Huweda Mursal, said, without explanation.
As the generals duke it out, many of the idealistic young Sudanese who helped topple Mr. al-Bashir in 2019 are sitting it out this time.
On the weekend, street photographers hustle for customers by the Nile at sunset, offering portraits for a dollar a pop. They take images of swaggering young men or young couples in Instagrammable poses by the storied river.
One photographer, Walid Abdul Karim, 22, an art student, said he once believed the fall of Mr. al-Bashir would open the door to “all good things — freedom, a better economy, hope.” He shrugged. “Now we realized that it just made a mess.”
But for others, the battered dream of a better Sudan lives on.
At a small cafe in Bahri, a bustling neighborhood north of the Nile, young men and women clustered over small cups of coffee. They belonged to “Anger Without Limits,” a group of hard core protesters leading the weekly clashes with the security forces. The risks are considerable. Scrolling through phones, several pointed to smiling pictures of dead friends — some of the 125 people killed, and 8,000 injured, since the coup.
On the day I left Khartoum they were out again, on streets covered in broken bricks and swathed in tear gas. As my flight climbed over the city, inky plumes of smoke billowed from the bridge that leads to Bahri — the fires lit by young Sudanese who insist they will never accept the rule, or the power games, of their generals.
|
87517e9b-68e6-466d-8cc8-37721962b3c3
|
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/10/books/booksupdate/19th-century-novels-quiz.html
|
Can You Find the Hidden Titles of a Dozen 19th-Century Novels?
|
2023-07-10
|
nytimes
|
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
|
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and
|
daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
Agnes Grey handed her aide the glossy issue of Vanity Fair she’d been reading in the car and wished she’d had time to finish the article on crime and punishment in the crypto world. She’d get back to it after the final security check at the Tower of London before the prime minister and the Japanese leader arrived.
She passed the woman in white from the press office, who was chatting with the wives and daughters of the officials along on the trip. Glancing over at Tower Wharf, she recognized Iola Leroy from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection scrutinizing three men in a boat floating along the Thames.
There were great expectations for this new defense agreement, so things had to go smoothly. If only the time machine she’d jokingly asked the professor at Cambridge to invent was a reality so she could skip over these nerve-racking days.
|
245aa50a-29b7-4483-be6d-e71e29517867
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/world/africa/hamdan-hemeti-sudan-rsf.html
|
What to Know About General Hamdan, Leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces
|
2023-04-15
|
nytimes
|
After starting as a camel trader who led a feared militia accused of atrocities in Darfur, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan has steadily amassed influence and riches in Sudan over the past two decades as he rose toward the pinnacle of power.
Even when his one-time patron, the autocratic ruler President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was ousted by pro-democracy protesters in 2019, General Hamdan turned it to his advantage — swiftly abandoning Mr. al-Bashir and, in the past year, reinventing himself as a born-again democrat with aspirations to lead Sudan himself.
At the same time, he allied himself with Russia and its Wagner private military company, whose mercenaries guard gold mines in Sudan and which has supplied military equipment to his forces.
But General Hamdan faced perhaps his toughest challenge yet on Saturday, as fighting raged across the capital between his powerful paramilitary group and the Sudanese army under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
“This man is a criminal,” General Hamdan said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, lashing out against General al-Burhan, the army chief who until Saturday was technically his boss and is now his mortal enemy.
“This man is a liar,” General Hamdan continued. “This man is a thief. He destroyed Sudan.”
The army hit back, with a spokesman disparaging General Hamdan a “rebel.” But the heated language brought home to many Sudanese that, despite his earlier talk about democracy, General Hamdan, a commander with a long record of ruthless action, was literally fighting for his future.
And it was a reminder of a depressing reality: Although protesters
ousted the widely reviled
Mr. al-Bashir in 2019, the military leaders who thrived in his brutal system of rule are still fighting to dominate the country.
General Hamdan cut his teeth as a commander with the janjaweed militias that carried out the worst atrocities in the western region of Darfur. The conflict, which began in 2003, displaced millions and caused the deaths of as many as 300,000 people.
His ability to crush local rebel groups won him the loyalty of Mr. al-Bashir, who in 2013 appointed him to lead the newly-created Rapid Support Forces.
After protesters flooded the streets of Khartoum in early 2019, roaring for Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster, General Hamdan turned on Mr. al-Bashir, helping to push him out of power.
But two months later, in June 2019, when
protesters demanding an immediate transition to civilian rule refused to leave a protest site,
General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces led a brutal assault.
His troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, dumping some of them in the Nile, according to numerous accounts from protesters and witnesses. At least 118 people were killed, according to Sudanese medics.
General Hamdan denied any role in the violence and bristled at those who referred to his fighters as janjaweed, despite the militia’s key role in his rise to power. “Janjaweed means a bandit who robs you on the road,” he
told The New York Times
. “It’s just propaganda from the opposition.”
Since then, the Rapid Support Forces has evolved into far more than a gun-toting rabble. With about 70,000 fighters by some estimates, the force has been deployed to quash insurgencies across Sudan and to fight for pay in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition.
War also made General Hamdan very rich, with interests in gold mining, construction and even a limousine company.
He has also emerged as a surprisingly agile politician, traveling across the Horn of Africa region and the Middle East to meet with leaders and developing close ties with Moscow.
|
After starting as a camel trader who led a feared militia accused of atrocities in Darfur, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan has steadily amassed influence and riches in Sudan over the past two decades as he rose toward the pinnacle of power.
Even when his one-time patron, the autocratic ruler President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was ousted by pro-democracy protesters in 2019, General Hamdan turned it to his advantage — swiftly abandoning Mr. al-Bashir and, in the past year, reinventing himself as a born-again democrat with aspirations to lead Sudan himself.
At the same time, he allied himself with Russia and its Wagner private military company, whose mercenaries guard gold mines in Sudan and which has supplied military equipment to his forces.
But General Hamdan faced perhaps his toughest challenge yet on Saturday, as fighting raged across the capital between his powerful paramilitary group and the Sudanese army under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
“This man is a criminal,” General Hamdan said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, lashing out against General al-Burhan, the army chief who until Saturday was technically his boss and is now his mortal enemy.
“This
|
man is a liar,” General Hamdan continued. “This man is a thief. He destroyed Sudan.”
The army hit back, with a spokesman disparaging General Hamdan a “rebel.” But the heated language brought home to many Sudanese that, despite his earlier talk about democracy, General Hamdan, a commander with a long record of ruthless action, was literally fighting for his future.
And it was a reminder of a depressing reality: Although protesters
ousted the widely reviled
Mr. al-Bashir in 2019, the military leaders who thrived in his brutal system of rule are still fighting to dominate the country.
General Hamdan cut his teeth as a commander with the janjaweed militias that carried out the worst atrocities in the western region of Darfur. The conflict, which began in 2003, displaced millions and caused the deaths of as many as 300,000 people.
His ability to crush local rebel groups won him the loyalty of Mr. al-Bashir, who in 2013 appointed him to lead the newly-created Rapid Support Forces.
After protesters flooded the streets of Khartoum in early 2019, roaring for Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster, General Hamdan turned on Mr. al-Bashir, helping to push him out of power.
But two months later, in June 2019, when
protesters demanding an immediate transition to civilian rule refused to leave a protest site,
General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces led a brutal assault.
His troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, dumping some of them in the Nile, according to numerous accounts from protesters and witnesses. At least 118 people were killed, according to Sudanese medics.
General Hamdan denied any role in the violence and bristled at those who referred to his fighters as janjaweed, despite the militia’s key role in his rise to power. “Janjaweed means a bandit who robs you on the road,” he
told The New York Times
. “It’s just propaganda from the opposition.”
Since then, the Rapid Support Forces has evolved into far more than a gun-toting rabble. With about 70,000 fighters by some estimates, the force has been deployed to quash insurgencies across Sudan and to fight for pay in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition.
War also made General Hamdan very rich, with interests in gold mining, construction and even a limousine company.
He has also emerged as a surprisingly agile politician, traveling across the Horn of Africa region and the Middle East to meet with leaders and developing close ties with Moscow.
|
9490fc70-0058-42c0-8435-b1b5b00b2564
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/05/09/world/russia-ukraine-news/fighting-superior-russian-firepower-ukrainian-forces-turn-off-the-shelf-drones-into-deadly-weapons
|
Putin Remains Defiant Toward West at Muted Victory Day Events
|
2023-05-09
|
nytimes
|
May 9, 2023, 12:26 p.m. ET
Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, met with her Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, in Berlin on Tuesday.
Credit...
Pool photo by Michele Tantussi
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said Beijing could choose to play a major role in ending the war in Ukraine and warned against undermining Western sanctions on Russia, as she and her visiting Chinese counterpart exchanged tough words in Berlin on Tuesday but promised to try to find common ground.
China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, was visiting the German capital on the first stop of a European tour that comes amid rising tensions between Chinese and European leaders, particularly over China’s friendly relationship with Russia. At a news conference after the two met, Mr. Qin and Ms. Baerbock aired their differences on international policy, particularly in relation to Russia’s invasion.
Ms. Baerbock used Russia’s Victory Day celebration of the Soviet victory against the Nazis in World War II to argue that Russia was exploiting and undermining its historic role by continuing its war in Ukraine. She said China could play a special role in resolving the conflict.
“China, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, can play a significant role in ending the war if it chooses to do so,” she said. China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion while also promising not to help Russia militarily.
Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Qin had an even sharper exchange just a few weeks earlier in Beijing, during the German foreign minister’s first official visit there. In Berlin, the two sides insisted their meetings highlighted their commitment to overcoming their differences.
Germany and China are scheduled next month to hold bilateral government talks on issues such as climate policy and trade. Mr. Qin said his visit was in preparation for those meetings.
At the news conference, Ms. Baerbock warned that European sanctions against Russia should “not be undermined in a roundabout way.” The European Union’s plans for an 11th round of sanctions, she said, included looking into measures that would target so-called dual-use goods, which have civilian purposes but could also be used militarily. Some countries, including China, have
continued to supply Russia with dual-use goods
, like microchips.
“This is not directed against any specific country, but relates specifically to these sanctioned goods,” Ms. Baerbock said. “But we expect all countries, and we also expect China, to exert appropriate influence on its companies in this sense.”
Mr. Qin responded to questions on Ukraine by saying that “simplification and emotionalization are not the solution.”
“China also did not cause this war, is not a party, but it is committed to peace negotiations,” he said. In recent months, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has been trying to
burnish his image
as a global statesman, but U.S. officials and
their allies have questioned
whether Mr. Xi has the ability to help mediate for peace in Ukraine
Mr. Qin said that China had its own legislation around dual-use goods and warned of retaliation against outside sanctions. He said there were “normal exchanges” between Chinese and Russian companies that should not be disturbed, adding that China would respond “strictly and severely” to attempts to do so.
He also warned Berlin and other European nations not to be dragged into a new “Cold War” bloc, in an apparent reference to calls in the United States for de-coupling from the Chinese economy and a corresponding debate in Europe over maintaining ties but “de-risking” trade relations with Beijing.
Mr. Qin’s European trip will also take him to France and Norway. The visit to Germany was a last-minute surprise, announced only a day in advance. Around the same time, Beijing requested to delay a visit from Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, raising the question of whether the move was a reaction to a tougher line on China by his pro-business party, the Free Democrats.
Show more
|
May 9, 2023, 12:26 p.m. ET
Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, met with her Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, in Berlin on Tuesday.
Credit...
Pool photo by Michele Tantussi
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said Beijing could choose to play a major role in ending the war in Ukraine and warned against undermining Western sanctions on Russia, as she and her visiting Chinese counterpart exchanged tough words in Berlin on Tuesday but promised to try to find common ground.
China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, was visiting the German capital on the first stop of a European tour that comes amid rising tensions between Chinese and European leaders, particularly over China’s friendly relationship with Russia. At a news conference after the two met, Mr. Qin and Ms. Baerbock aired their differences on international policy, particularly in relation to Russia’s invasion.
Ms. Baerbock used Russia’s Victory Day celebration of the Soviet victory against the Nazis in World War II to argue that Russia was exploiting and undermining its historic role by continuing its war in Ukraine. She said China could play a special role in resolving the conflict.
“China, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security
|
Council, can play a significant role in ending the war if it chooses to do so,” she said. China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion while also promising not to help Russia militarily.
Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Qin had an even sharper exchange just a few weeks earlier in Beijing, during the German foreign minister’s first official visit there. In Berlin, the two sides insisted their meetings highlighted their commitment to overcoming their differences.
Germany and China are scheduled next month to hold bilateral government talks on issues such as climate policy and trade. Mr. Qin said his visit was in preparation for those meetings.
At the news conference, Ms. Baerbock warned that European sanctions against Russia should “not be undermined in a roundabout way.” The European Union’s plans for an 11th round of sanctions, she said, included looking into measures that would target so-called dual-use goods, which have civilian purposes but could also be used militarily. Some countries, including China, have
continued to supply Russia with dual-use goods
, like microchips.
“This is not directed against any specific country, but relates specifically to these sanctioned goods,” Ms. Baerbock said. “But we expect all countries, and we also expect China, to exert appropriate influence on its companies in this sense.”
Mr. Qin responded to questions on Ukraine by saying that “simplification and emotionalization are not the solution.”
“China also did not cause this war, is not a party, but it is committed to peace negotiations,” he said. In recent months, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has been trying to
burnish his image
as a global statesman, but U.S. officials and
their allies have questioned
whether Mr. Xi has the ability to help mediate for peace in Ukraine
Mr. Qin said that China had its own legislation around dual-use goods and warned of retaliation against outside sanctions. He said there were “normal exchanges” between Chinese and Russian companies that should not be disturbed, adding that China would respond “strictly and severely” to attempts to do so.
He also warned Berlin and other European nations not to be dragged into a new “Cold War” bloc, in an apparent reference to calls in the United States for de-coupling from the Chinese economy and a corresponding debate in Europe over maintaining ties but “de-risking” trade relations with Beijing.
Mr. Qin’s European trip will also take him to France and Norway. The visit to Germany was a last-minute surprise, announced only a day in advance. Around the same time, Beijing requested to delay a visit from Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, raising the question of whether the move was a reaction to a tougher line on China by his pro-business party, the Free Democrats.
Show more
|
18e59aa1-c839-4503-aeb9-9450148470e2
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/nyregion/fbi-spy-charged-mcgonigal.html
|
Former F.B.I. Spy Hunter Admits to Hiding Payments in Overseas Dealings
|
2023-09-22
|
nytimes
|
A former top F.B.I. spy hunter pleaded guilty on Friday in Federal District Court in Washington to concealing payments he received from an Albanian-born businessman — a former intelligence agent he had helped in business dealings overseas.
The official, Charles F. McGonigal, the F.B.I.’s former director of counterintelligence in New York, had been the bureau’s highest-ranking official to be accused of corruption in recent years.
His plea marked the second time in as many months that Mr. McGonigal admitted to criminal wrongdoing. On Aug. 15, he pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and to laundering payments from a prominent Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska.
He pleaded guilty to a single count of hiding from the F.B.I. the payments he received from Agron Neza, a former Albanian intelligence officer who had moved to New Jersey. As in the New York case, the plea deal between Mr. McGonigal and the prosecutors in Washington resulted in reduced charges.
The Washington prosecutors agreed to drop eight of the nine counts originally lodged against him at the time of sentencing, most of which had carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But under the deal unveiled Friday, Mr. McGonigal was required to acknowledge that he had in fact committed the broader acts he had been accused of — even those to which he did not plead guilty.
In court on Friday, Mr. McGonigal told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that before he left the F.B.I. in 2018, he had started planning the launch of a security consulting company that would leverage the contacts he had made at the bureau after his retirement. He said he knew he should have disclosed payments he received and meetings he held in planning the company, but he did not do so for fear of raising questions at the F.B.I. that might interfere with his future venture.
Mr. McGonigal’s maximum sentence under each of his plea agreements is five years in prison; the judges in both cases could sentence him to less time and order that they be served concurrently.
The plea on Friday brought an effective close to a scandal that had embarrassed the F.B.I. and shocked many in the bureau who had worked with the seemingly strait-laced supervisor for years. F.B.I. officials have said they found no evidence that Mr. McGonigal had leaked information to foreign officials or otherwise compromised bureau activities or national security.
Mr. McGonigal, 55, had been indicted in New York and Washington in January. The Washington case was primarily related to Mr. McGonigal’s interactions with overseas interests. According to prosecutors, he had failed to truthfully disclose, as he was legally required to, the details of his foreign travel and his meetings with foreign government officials and business people. The criminal charges related to falsifying or failing to make disclosures about his travel and contacts will be dropped at sentencing.
Mr. McGonigal admitted to accepting $225,000 in cash installments from Mr. Neza, and to traveling to Albania with him and helping steer an oil drilling license to a company affiliated with Mr. Neza. Mr. McGonigal requested the money as a loan from Mr. Neza as they discussed a prospective business venture, including the formation of the consulting company to which he referred in court Friday, but there were no terms to the loan and it was never repaid, according to the description of his conduct filed with the plea agreement.
Mr. McGonigal also acknowledged other elements of the indictment:
He used his position to try to generate a $500,000 payment to Mr. Neza from an Eastern European pharmaceutical company. And he engineered an F.B.I. investigation into an American lobbyist working for a political rival of the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, with whom Mr. McGonigal had developed a friendship. The investigation did not result in charges.
The judge scheduled Mr. McGonigal’s sentencing in the Washington case for Feb. 16, 2024. He is to be sentenced in New York on Dec. 14.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
|
A former top F.B.I. spy hunter pleaded guilty on Friday in Federal District Court in Washington to concealing payments he received from an Albanian-born businessman — a former intelligence agent he had helped in business dealings overseas.
The official, Charles F. McGonigal, the F.B.I.’s former director of counterintelligence in New York, had been the bureau’s highest-ranking official to be accused of corruption in recent years.
His plea marked the second time in as many months that Mr. McGonigal admitted to criminal wrongdoing. On Aug. 15, he pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and to laundering payments from a prominent Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska.
He pleaded guilty to a single count of hiding from the F.B.I. the payments he received from Agron Neza, a former Albanian intelligence officer who had moved to New Jersey. As in the New York case, the plea deal between Mr. McGonigal and the prosecutors in Washington resulted in reduced charges.
The Washington prosecutors agreed to drop eight of the nine counts originally lodged against him at the time of sentencing, most of which had carried a maximum sentence
|
of 20 years in prison. But under the deal unveiled Friday, Mr. McGonigal was required to acknowledge that he had in fact committed the broader acts he had been accused of — even those to which he did not plead guilty.
In court on Friday, Mr. McGonigal told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that before he left the F.B.I. in 2018, he had started planning the launch of a security consulting company that would leverage the contacts he had made at the bureau after his retirement. He said he knew he should have disclosed payments he received and meetings he held in planning the company, but he did not do so for fear of raising questions at the F.B.I. that might interfere with his future venture.
Mr. McGonigal’s maximum sentence under each of his plea agreements is five years in prison; the judges in both cases could sentence him to less time and order that they be served concurrently.
The plea on Friday brought an effective close to a scandal that had embarrassed the F.B.I. and shocked many in the bureau who had worked with the seemingly strait-laced supervisor for years. F.B.I. officials have said they found no evidence that Mr. McGonigal had leaked information to foreign officials or otherwise compromised bureau activities or national security.
Mr. McGonigal, 55, had been indicted in New York and Washington in January. The Washington case was primarily related to Mr. McGonigal’s interactions with overseas interests. According to prosecutors, he had failed to truthfully disclose, as he was legally required to, the details of his foreign travel and his meetings with foreign government officials and business people. The criminal charges related to falsifying or failing to make disclosures about his travel and contacts will be dropped at sentencing.
Mr. McGonigal admitted to accepting $225,000 in cash installments from Mr. Neza, and to traveling to Albania with him and helping steer an oil drilling license to a company affiliated with Mr. Neza. Mr. McGonigal requested the money as a loan from Mr. Neza as they discussed a prospective business venture, including the formation of the consulting company to which he referred in court Friday, but there were no terms to the loan and it was never repaid, according to the description of his conduct filed with the plea agreement.
Mr. McGonigal also acknowledged other elements of the indictment:
He used his position to try to generate a $500,000 payment to Mr. Neza from an Eastern European pharmaceutical company. And he engineered an F.B.I. investigation into an American lobbyist working for a political rival of the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, with whom Mr. McGonigal had developed a friendship. The investigation did not result in charges.
The judge scheduled Mr. McGonigal’s sentencing in the Washington case for Feb. 16, 2024. He is to be sentenced in New York on Dec. 14.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
|
9243d895-114d-4e2a-bc80-f8a8d96b6723
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-accusations-legacy.html
|
Is Sean Combs’s Empire at Risk After Sexual Assault Suits?
|
2023-12-01
|
nytimes
|
“He was the icon for hip-hop moving off the street, into the clubs and into bottle service,” said Dan Charnas, the author of “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop.”
Mr. Combs has described his most recent reinvention as his “love era,” taking Love as his latest stage name and titling his recent LP “The Love Album: Off the Grid.” He has espoused a social justice-focused approach for his businesses, with Combs Global, his umbrella company, adopting a mission to “build iconic brands and empower diverse communities at the same time.” Lately he has given
millions of dollars in donations
to historically Black colleges and universities.
The wave of lawsuits against him now threatens that image. In the
second case
, Joi Dickerson-Neal accused Mr. Combs of drugging and raping her in 1991, and recording the incident on video; in her complaint, Ms. Dickerson-Neal said that the news of Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit had prompted her to file her own. In a third suit, Liza Gardner says that in 1990, Mr. Combs coerced her into sex and then, a couple of days later, choked her so hard she passed out. All three suits were filed as a deadline approached for the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that allowed people who said they were sexually abused to file claims even after the statute of limitations had expired.
In a statement, Jonathan D. Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said: “The new claims against Mr. Combs for alleged misconduct from many years ago, which were filed at the last minute, are all denied and rejected by him. He views these lawsuits as a money grab. Because of Mr. Combs’s fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who attempt to smear him. The New York Legislature surely did not intend or expect its laws to be misused. Mr. Combs trusts that the public will remain skeptical and not rush to accept the unsubstantiated allegations made against him.”
A representative of Mr. Combs declined to address more detailed questions about the impact of the recent lawsuits on Mr. Combs’s business and other pursuits or respond to questions about past accusations of violence by Mr. Combs. But the size of Combs Global, which includes his record label, Revolt, a bottled water brand and his Sean John clothing line, among other businesses, could insulate his brand from significant financial fallout.
As news of those suits ricocheted through social media, accusations from Mr. Combs’s past were resurfaced and dissected. In a 2004 interview,
Kimora Lee Simmons
, the model and TV personality, said that Mr. Combs had threatened her while she was pregnant. Gina Huynh, a onetime girlfriend, said on a 2019
podcast
that Mr. Combs had dragged her by the hair, thrown a high-heel shoe at her and pressured her to get two abortions.
|
“He was the icon for hip-hop moving off the street, into the clubs and into bottle service,” said Dan Charnas, the author of “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop.”
Mr. Combs has described his most recent reinvention as his “love era,” taking Love as his latest stage name and titling his recent LP “The Love Album: Off the Grid.” He has espoused a social justice-focused approach for his businesses, with Combs Global, his umbrella company, adopting a mission to “build iconic brands and empower diverse communities at the same time.” Lately he has given
millions of dollars in donations
to historically Black colleges and universities.
The wave of lawsuits against him now threatens that image. In the
second case
, Joi Dickerson-Neal accused Mr. Combs of drugging and raping her in 1991, and recording the incident on video; in her complaint, Ms. Dickerson-Neal said that the news of Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit had prompted her to file her own. In a third suit, Liza Gardner says that in 1990, Mr. Combs coerced her into sex and then, a couple of days later, choked
|
her so hard she passed out. All three suits were filed as a deadline approached for the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that allowed people who said they were sexually abused to file claims even after the statute of limitations had expired.
In a statement, Jonathan D. Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said: “The new claims against Mr. Combs for alleged misconduct from many years ago, which were filed at the last minute, are all denied and rejected by him. He views these lawsuits as a money grab. Because of Mr. Combs’s fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who attempt to smear him. The New York Legislature surely did not intend or expect its laws to be misused. Mr. Combs trusts that the public will remain skeptical and not rush to accept the unsubstantiated allegations made against him.”
A representative of Mr. Combs declined to address more detailed questions about the impact of the recent lawsuits on Mr. Combs’s business and other pursuits or respond to questions about past accusations of violence by Mr. Combs. But the size of Combs Global, which includes his record label, Revolt, a bottled water brand and his Sean John clothing line, among other businesses, could insulate his brand from significant financial fallout.
As news of those suits ricocheted through social media, accusations from Mr. Combs’s past were resurfaced and dissected. In a 2004 interview,
Kimora Lee Simmons
, the model and TV personality, said that Mr. Combs had threatened her while she was pregnant. Gina Huynh, a onetime girlfriend, said on a 2019
podcast
that Mr. Combs had dragged her by the hair, thrown a high-heel shoe at her and pressured her to get two abortions.
|
98efc27b-669f-4db6-838b-b8fa37eb3ebf
|
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/17/us/maine-ruling-on-trump-ballot-eligibility.html
|
Read the Maine Judge’s Ruling on Trump’s Ballot Eligibility
|
2024-01-17
|
nytimes
|
STATE OF MAINE KENNEBEC, ss.
DONALD J. TRUMP,
Petitioner,
V.
SHENNA BELLOWS, in her official capacity as Secretary of State for the State of Maine,
and
Respondent,
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
KIMBERLEY ROSEN, THOMAS
SAVIELLO, and ETHAN STRIMLING, )
)
Parties-in-Interest.
SUPERIOR COURT CIVIL ACTION
Docket No. AP-24-01
1
ORDER AND DECISION (M.R. Civ. P. 80C)
Petitioner former President Donald J. Trump ("President Trump") has appealed the Ruling of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, dated December 28, 2023 ("the Ruling"), on three challenges to President Trump's petition to appear on the Maine Republican presidential primary ballot. In her Ruling, the Secretary of State ("the Secretary") concluded that President Trump's primary petition was invalid because his candidate consent form contained a false statement and because he was disqualified from holding the office of President of the United States under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides as follows:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of twothirds of each House, remove such disability.
|
STATE OF MAINE KENNEBEC, ss.
DONALD J. TRUMP,
Petitioner,
V.
SHENNA BELLOWS, in her official capacity as Secretary of State for the State of Maine,
and
Respondent,
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
KIMBERLEY ROSEN, THOMAS
SAVIELLO, and ETHAN STRIMLING, )
)
Parties-in-Interest.
SUPERIOR COURT CIVIL ACTION
Docket No. AP-24-01
1
ORDER AND DECISION (M.R. Civ. P. 80C)
|
Petitioner former President Donald J. Trump ("President Trump") has appealed the Ruling of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, dated December 28, 2023 ("the Ruling"), on three challenges to President Trump's petition to appear on the Maine Republican presidential primary ballot. In her Ruling, the Secretary of State ("the Secretary") concluded that President Trump's primary petition was invalid because his candidate consent form contained a false statement and because he was disqualified from holding the office of President of the United States under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides as follows:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of twothirds of each House, remove such disability.
|
58770ca2-12bb-42cd-a9ee-c3533266b6c7
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/dining/dinners-that-dont-feel-insane-to-cook-the-week-of-thanksgiving.html
|
Dinners That Don’t Feel Insane to Cook the Week of Thanksgiving
|
2023-11-20
|
nytimes
|
With all the pre-Thanksgiving preparations going on — the list-checking and turkey brining, the stock-simmering and pie-crust rolling — making actual dinners this week can feel like too much. A legit move is to order in, of course. But here’s another thought: Why wait for takeout when we at New York Times Cooking have a veritable
cornucopia of excellent alternatives
that are nearly as easy, just as fast (if not faster) and certainly more economical?
I can personally vouch for Kenji López-Alt’s
San Francisco-style Vietnamese American garlic noodles
(above), which come together in a mere 15 minutes — less time than it takes my family to even choose a takeout menu. Made from pantry staples and few tablespoons of butter, Kenji’s recipe is a paragon of umami deliciousness.
Featured Collection
View Collection →
In the same recipe collection, Priya Krishna’s
tomato rice with crispy Cheddar
, which she describes as pizza in rice form, is a hybrid of classic South Indian tomato rice and a Spanish rice recipe that Priya and her mom, Ritu Krishna (a co-author of the recipe), copied out of Priya’s seventh-grade Spanish textbook. It’s a 20-minute marvel.
Eric Kim brings another excellent rice vibe with his
sheet-pan bibimbap
. To make it, he roasts a colorful array of vegetables on one pan while crisping rice and cooking eggs on another pan at the same time. Then the contents of the two pans meet to become “a kaleidoscope of flavors and textures,” rounded out with a drizzle of sesame oil, a dollop of gochujang and some kimchi.
Either of these dishes makes a meal on its own, or you could serve Genevieve Ko’s sweet and savory
maple-baked salmon
alongside. Save any leftover salmon for lunchtime salads or sandwiches.
But wait, I have two more cooking inspirations for you for this week! Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest column features
spicy roasted mushrooms with polenta
, and it’s a beauty. A mix of roasted mushrooms and charred tomatoes is spooned over a soft mound of polenta, and then the whole thing is bathed in a ruddy, fiery oil seasoned with cinnamon, fresh ginger, Aleppo pepper and Sichuan peppercorns. Gorgeous, and vegan, too.
And then there’s Colu Henry’s cozy
pasta e ceci
, a tomatoey stew of chickpeas and escarole dotted with pasta and showered with Parmesan.
It would be so virtuous to skip sweets this week and wait for the
Thanksgiving dessert-a-palooza
. But I’m not known for that kind of forbearance. Whatever your case, having a
sour-cream coffee cake
on the counter for swipes and nibbles is never a bad idea.
You do need a
subscription
for these recipes. Subscribing to
New York Times Cooking
supports our work bringing you new recipes every single week. Doing it now, just in time for the holiday season, will pay you back amply. (Especially since you can save 50 percent on your first year of Cooking during the
holiday sale
.) If you need any technical help, the brilliant people at
[email protected]
are there for you. And I’m at
[email protected]
if you want to say hi.
🧊 Turkey Tracker 🧊
|
With all the pre-Thanksgiving preparations going on — the list-checking and turkey brining, the stock-simmering and pie-crust rolling — making actual dinners this week can feel like too much. A legit move is to order in, of course. But here’s another thought: Why wait for takeout when we at New York Times Cooking have a veritable
cornucopia of excellent alternatives
that are nearly as easy, just as fast (if not faster) and certainly more economical?
I can personally vouch for Kenji López-Alt’s
San Francisco-style Vietnamese American garlic noodles
(above), which come together in a mere 15 minutes — less time than it takes my family to even choose a takeout menu. Made from pantry staples and few tablespoons of butter, Kenji’s recipe is a paragon of umami deliciousness.
Featured Collection
View Collection →
In the same recipe collection, Priya Krishna’s
tomato rice with crispy Cheddar
, which she describes as pizza in rice form, is a hybrid of classic South Indian tomato rice and a Spanish rice recipe that Priya and her mom, Ritu Krishna (a co-author of the recipe), copied out of
|
Priya’s seventh-grade Spanish textbook. It’s a 20-minute marvel.
Eric Kim brings another excellent rice vibe with his
sheet-pan bibimbap
. To make it, he roasts a colorful array of vegetables on one pan while crisping rice and cooking eggs on another pan at the same time. Then the contents of the two pans meet to become “a kaleidoscope of flavors and textures,” rounded out with a drizzle of sesame oil, a dollop of gochujang and some kimchi.
Either of these dishes makes a meal on its own, or you could serve Genevieve Ko’s sweet and savory
maple-baked salmon
alongside. Save any leftover salmon for lunchtime salads or sandwiches.
But wait, I have two more cooking inspirations for you for this week! Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest column features
spicy roasted mushrooms with polenta
, and it’s a beauty. A mix of roasted mushrooms and charred tomatoes is spooned over a soft mound of polenta, and then the whole thing is bathed in a ruddy, fiery oil seasoned with cinnamon, fresh ginger, Aleppo pepper and Sichuan peppercorns. Gorgeous, and vegan, too.
And then there’s Colu Henry’s cozy
pasta e ceci
, a tomatoey stew of chickpeas and escarole dotted with pasta and showered with Parmesan.
It would be so virtuous to skip sweets this week and wait for the
Thanksgiving dessert-a-palooza
. But I’m not known for that kind of forbearance. Whatever your case, having a
sour-cream coffee cake
on the counter for swipes and nibbles is never a bad idea.
You do need a
subscription
for these recipes. Subscribing to
New York Times Cooking
supports our work bringing you new recipes every single week. Doing it now, just in time for the holiday season, will pay you back amply. (Especially since you can save 50 percent on your first year of Cooking during the
holiday sale
.) If you need any technical help, the brilliant people at
[email protected]
are there for you. And I’m at
[email protected]
if you want to say hi.
🧊 Turkey Tracker 🧊
|
f8260d76-3aeb-4751-bf80-28f9d06ff4cd
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/world/asia/japan-fukushima-water.html
|
Japan Starts Releasing Radioactive Fukushima Water
|
2023-08-24
|
nytimes
|
The News
Japan began releasing into the ocean the first tranche of more than a million tons of treated radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Thursday. The Chinese government, which has been the most vocal regional opponent to the discharge plan, responded by announcing that it would suspend seafood imports from Japan. China imported about $3.2 million in fresh seafood from Japan in July.
The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operated the plant and is overseeing its decommissioning, have promised that the water is safe for humans and that they will monitor the continuing release to make sure that radioactive material does not exceed international standards.
Why It Matters
In the two years since Japan announced its plan to release the wastewater into the sea, the plan has provoked serious political tensions with nearby China and South Korea, as well as anxiety at home. The Chinese government had previously criticized the plan as unsafe; in South Korea, the administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol supports Japan’s efforts, but opposition lawmakers have castigated the move as a potential threat to humans. Within Japan, fishermen’s unions fear that public anxiety about the safety of the water could affect their livelihoods.
Background
Ever since a huge earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a meltdown at the Fukushima plant, Tepco, as the power company is known, has used water to cool the ruined nuclear fuel rods that remain too hot to remove. As the water passes through the reactors, it picks up nuclear materials. The power company runs the cooling water through treatment plants that remove most radioactive nuclides except for tritium, which the
International Atomic Energy Agency
said in July will not pose a serious health threat to humans if released to the ocean.
The Japanese government has said that with more than 1.34 million tons of wastewater already accumulated on site, the power company will shortly run out of storage room and that it has no choice but to release the water into the ocean.
What’s Next
The first release of 7,800 tons of treated water is expected to last about 17 days. Both Tepco and Japan’s fisheries agency have said they will monitor the ocean water for radioactive levels, and the IAEA has said it will also oversee the process, which is expected to last decades.
To compensate fishermen who lose business due to public anxiety, the Japanese government is allocating 80 billion yen ($552 million).
Miharu Nishiyama and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.
|
The News
Japan began releasing into the ocean the first tranche of more than a million tons of treated radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Thursday. The Chinese government, which has been the most vocal regional opponent to the discharge plan, responded by announcing that it would suspend seafood imports from Japan. China imported about $3.2 million in fresh seafood from Japan in July.
The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operated the plant and is overseeing its decommissioning, have promised that the water is safe for humans and that they will monitor the continuing release to make sure that radioactive material does not exceed international standards.
Why It Matters
In the two years since Japan announced its plan to release the wastewater into the sea, the plan has provoked serious political tensions with nearby China and South Korea, as well as anxiety at home. The Chinese government had previously criticized the plan as unsafe; in South Korea, the administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol supports Japan’s efforts, but opposition lawmakers have castigated the move as a potential threat to humans. Within Japan, fishermen’s unions fear that public anxiety about the safety of the water could affect their livelihoods.
Background
Ever since a huge earthquake and tsunami in 2
|
011 led to a meltdown at the Fukushima plant, Tepco, as the power company is known, has used water to cool the ruined nuclear fuel rods that remain too hot to remove. As the water passes through the reactors, it picks up nuclear materials. The power company runs the cooling water through treatment plants that remove most radioactive nuclides except for tritium, which the
International Atomic Energy Agency
said in July will not pose a serious health threat to humans if released to the ocean.
The Japanese government has said that with more than 1.34 million tons of wastewater already accumulated on site, the power company will shortly run out of storage room and that it has no choice but to release the water into the ocean.
What’s Next
The first release of 7,800 tons of treated water is expected to last about 17 days. Both Tepco and Japan’s fisheries agency have said they will monitor the ocean water for radioactive levels, and the IAEA has said it will also oversee the process, which is expected to last decades.
To compensate fishermen who lose business due to public anxiety, the Japanese government is allocating 80 billion yen ($552 million).
Miharu Nishiyama and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.
|
e2e69029-1fe5-4225-8962-0cd46b1abdfd
|
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/11/world/russia-ukraine-news/zelensky-trudeau-canada-military-aid
|
As Fighting Rages, Ukraine Claims a Gain in Southeast
|
2023-06-10
|
nytimes
|
Russian forces opened fire Sunday on a boat that was rescuing civilians from flooding caused by the destruction of a dam in southern Ukraine, killing three people and wounding 10 others, local authorities said.
The head of the military administration in the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on the messaging service Telegram that a 74-year-old man was among the dead and two law enforcement officers were among the wounded. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Russia has repeatedly staged attacks on rescue efforts since the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday, according to Ukrainian officials and aid groups. The failure of the dam sent a torrent of water coursing down the Dnipro River, only adding to the peril facing communities on the frontline of the conflict.
Although the waters have receded, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, local volunteer groups and aid agencies were struggling to respond. At least 14 people were killed in the flooding and at least 35 others were missing, while dozens of communities have been cut off from clean water.
The river’s frontline location has further complicated rescue efforts. Russian forces that retreated from the city of Kherson in November to the eastern bank of the Dnipro have launched thousands of rocket and missile attacks back across the river. A total of 41 shells had exploded over the previous 24 hours, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday.
Russian troops controlled the dam, and engineering and munitions experts have said that a deliberate explosion inside it probably caused the dam’s collapse. American intelligence analysts suspect that Russia was behind the dam’s destruction, but do not have conclusive evidence yet about who was responsible. Moscow’s accusations that the government in Kyiv was responsible for the disaster have been
met with scorn
in Ukraine.
“The occupiers created this disaster by blowing up a dam, leaving people to their fate in flooded towns and villages, and then shelling the boats that are trying to take people away,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address.
Representatives from the International Criminal Court had already visited the affected areas, he added.
In its latest update on the toll of the disaster, Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry said that 77 urban settlements in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions had been flooded. It added that rescue workers had evacuated more than 3,600 people, many of whom are elderly. Many more residents have fled the area in cars and by rail on their own.
Ukrainian authorities said that six people had died, while pro-Russian officials earlier put the death toll in the area of Kherson region that they control at eight.
The surge of water through the dam peaked a few days after the explosion and has since started to diminish as water rushes into the Black Sea. On Sunday, Ukraine’s state hydropower company, Ukrhydroenergo, said the water level in the reservoir had dropped by around three feet in the previous 24 hours, and by more than 21 feet in total since the dam collapsed.
The reduction in the water level poses a new risk to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is situated on the reservoir’s eastern bank and is controlled by Russian forces. The plant, which this week put the last of its six reactors into a cold shutdown, uses reservoir water to cool its reactors and spent fuel.
It also complicates the military calculations for both sides as a
Ukrainian counteroffensive gets underway
to retake land in the south and east of the country.
Officials were also grappling with the environmental toll. The dam disaster has polluted water supplies and, over time, it will deplete groundwater levels upstream — creating a long-term problem for a population well beyond those living in the immediate flood zone. In one initial indication of the impact, the internal affairs ministry said that 162,000 customers in Dnipropetrovsk region, which is upstream of the dam, were without a supply of clean water.
It will also affect irrigation that feeds the fertile land in the river’s basin, a rich source of the country’s agricultural exports, and threaten wildlife in a region with several national parks.
“The situation in national parks is critical,” said Ukraine’s environment minister, Ruslan Strilets, in a post on Facebook.
On the Russian-held east bank, Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed governor, said on Saturday morning that more than 6,000 people had been evacuated from the Russian-held flooded territories, including 235 children. More than 60 people had been hospitalized, he said on Telegram.
The dam disaster also poses potential problems for
Crimea
, a dry region illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 that relies on a canal fed by the Dnipro River for some of its water supply.
The flooding has “severely disrupted this primary water source,” according to a report issued on Sunday by Britain’s defense intelligence agency.
|
Russian forces opened fire Sunday on a boat that was rescuing civilians from flooding caused by the destruction of a dam in southern Ukraine, killing three people and wounding 10 others, local authorities said.
The head of the military administration in the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on the messaging service Telegram that a 74-year-old man was among the dead and two law enforcement officers were among the wounded. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Russia has repeatedly staged attacks on rescue efforts since the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday, according to Ukrainian officials and aid groups. The failure of the dam sent a torrent of water coursing down the Dnipro River, only adding to the peril facing communities on the frontline of the conflict.
Although the waters have receded, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, local volunteer groups and aid agencies were struggling to respond. At least 14 people were killed in the flooding and at least 35 others were missing, while dozens of communities have been cut off from clean water.
The river’s frontline location has further complicated rescue efforts. Russian forces that retreated from the city of Kherson in November to the eastern bank of the Dnipro have launched thousands of rocket and missile
|
attacks back across the river. A total of 41 shells had exploded over the previous 24 hours, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday.
Russian troops controlled the dam, and engineering and munitions experts have said that a deliberate explosion inside it probably caused the dam’s collapse. American intelligence analysts suspect that Russia was behind the dam’s destruction, but do not have conclusive evidence yet about who was responsible. Moscow’s accusations that the government in Kyiv was responsible for the disaster have been
met with scorn
in Ukraine.
“The occupiers created this disaster by blowing up a dam, leaving people to their fate in flooded towns and villages, and then shelling the boats that are trying to take people away,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address.
Representatives from the International Criminal Court had already visited the affected areas, he added.
In its latest update on the toll of the disaster, Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry said that 77 urban settlements in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions had been flooded. It added that rescue workers had evacuated more than 3,600 people, many of whom are elderly. Many more residents have fled the area in cars and by rail on their own.
Ukrainian authorities said that six people had died, while pro-Russian officials earlier put the death toll in the area of Kherson region that they control at eight.
The surge of water through the dam peaked a few days after the explosion and has since started to diminish as water rushes into the Black Sea. On Sunday, Ukraine’s state hydropower company, Ukrhydroenergo, said the water level in the reservoir had dropped by around three feet in the previous 24 hours, and by more than 21 feet in total since the dam collapsed.
The reduction in the water level poses a new risk to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is situated on the reservoir’s eastern bank and is controlled by Russian forces. The plant, which this week put the last of its six reactors into a cold shutdown, uses reservoir water to cool its reactors and spent fuel.
It also complicates the military calculations for both sides as a
Ukrainian counteroffensive gets underway
to retake land in the south and east of the country.
Officials were also grappling with the environmental toll. The dam disaster has polluted water supplies and, over time, it will deplete groundwater levels upstream — creating a long-term problem for a population well beyond those living in the immediate flood zone. In one initial indication of the impact, the internal affairs ministry said that 162,000 customers in Dnipropetrovsk region, which is upstream of the dam, were without a supply of clean water.
It will also affect irrigation that feeds the fertile land in the river’s basin, a rich source of the country’s agricultural exports, and threaten wildlife in a region with several national parks.
“The situation in national parks is critical,” said Ukraine’s environment minister, Ruslan Strilets, in a post on Facebook.
On the Russian-held east bank, Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed governor, said on Saturday morning that more than 6,000 people had been evacuated from the Russian-held flooded territories, including 235 children. More than 60 people had been hospitalized, he said on Telegram.
The dam disaster also poses potential problems for
Crimea
, a dry region illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 that relies on a canal fed by the Dnipro River for some of its water supply.
The flooding has “severely disrupted this primary water source,” according to a report issued on Sunday by Britain’s defense intelligence agency.
|
bc5c5961-c934-4307-a1be-b45cad8d6b3e
|
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/dining/grilled-spiedies-steak-and-a-classic-senegalese-sauce.html
|
Grilled Spiedies, Steak and a Classic Senegalese Sauce
|
2023-07-21
|
nytimes
|
Good morning. Back-to-school advertising has started to show up in my feeds, and it’s depressing. Summers lasted forever when I was a child. Now they hurtle past, express trains bound for shorter days and hard shoes. I don’t need to be reminded of that. I want to grill and grill and grill some more, eat outside and devour tomatoes and corn. I rage against the wearing of a coat.
So this weekend?
Spiedies
, that unbeatable taste of upstate New York, Binghamton on a stick. My recipe calls for a homemade marinade and at least 24 hours of marination, but if you use pork shoulder you can do very well with store-bought Italian dressing and a three-hour soak. Thread the knuckles of meat onto skewers, then grill them over a fairly hot grill; serve with seeded Italian semolina bread, hot sauce and a white sauce of mayonnaise, sour cream, minced garlic and a splash of red wine vinegar. That’s very good with
coleslaw
.
Alternatively, you might try Yewande Komolafe’s new recipe for
grilled steak with sauce rof
(above), a Senegalese condiment made of minced onion, parsley, scallions and chile. I’d go with skirt or hanger steak there, and maybe one extra jalapeño for pop. Or try Melissa Clark’s
gingery grilled chicken thighs with charred peaches
? Or
Buffalo grilled mushrooms
from Ali Slagle?
Featured Recipe
View Recipe →
Take a look, too, at Christian Reynoso’s latest, a recipe for
poc chuc
, citrus-marinated grilled pork of Mayan origins, from the state of Yucatán in Mexico. Serve with beans, rice, tortillas, pickled onions, cabbage and avocado.
For breakfast, how about Dawn Perry’s recipe for
sour cream and fruit scones
? I love Steven Raichlen’s recipe for
torrijas
, a Spanish-style French toast. Maybe you’d prefer Alison Roman’s recipe for
eggs Benedict
.
Thousands more recipes to cook as summer begins its descent are waiting for you on
New York Times Cooking
. Yes, you need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t done so already, I hope that you will
subscribe today
. Thanks.
You are not alone! If you run into issues with our technology, please reach out:
[email protected]
. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write directly to me if you’d like to yell about something or pay us a compliment:
[email protected]
. I get a lot of mail and can’t respond to every letter. But I do read every one I get.
Now, it’s nothing to do with millet or
pad Thai
, but I’m deep into John Irving’s 2022 novel, “
The Last Chairlift
,” 900 pages of secrets, sex and families. It’s a lot. But it’s pure Irving, funny against the sadness, with plenty of awe — and “aww.”
Here’s Rachel Kushner in Harper’s with “
Street Life
,” a walking meditation worth savoring.
One man’s opinion, but the second season of “
Joe Pickett
” on Paramount+ is better than the first.
Finally, why don’t you join me in my seasonal malaise, listening to Lana Del Rey’s “
Summertime Sadness
” on repeat while you cook? And I’ll see you on Sunday.
|
Good morning. Back-to-school advertising has started to show up in my feeds, and it’s depressing. Summers lasted forever when I was a child. Now they hurtle past, express trains bound for shorter days and hard shoes. I don’t need to be reminded of that. I want to grill and grill and grill some more, eat outside and devour tomatoes and corn. I rage against the wearing of a coat.
So this weekend?
Spiedies
, that unbeatable taste of upstate New York, Binghamton on a stick. My recipe calls for a homemade marinade and at least 24 hours of marination, but if you use pork shoulder you can do very well with store-bought Italian dressing and a three-hour soak. Thread the knuckles of meat onto skewers, then grill them over a fairly hot grill; serve with seeded Italian semolina bread, hot sauce and a white sauce of mayonnaise, sour cream, minced garlic and a splash of red wine vinegar. That’s very good with
coleslaw
.
Alternatively, you might try Yewande Komolafe’s new recipe for
grilled steak with sauce rof
(above), a Senegalese condiment made of minced onion
|
, parsley, scallions and chile. I’d go with skirt or hanger steak there, and maybe one extra jalapeño for pop. Or try Melissa Clark’s
gingery grilled chicken thighs with charred peaches
? Or
Buffalo grilled mushrooms
from Ali Slagle?
Featured Recipe
View Recipe →
Take a look, too, at Christian Reynoso’s latest, a recipe for
poc chuc
, citrus-marinated grilled pork of Mayan origins, from the state of Yucatán in Mexico. Serve with beans, rice, tortillas, pickled onions, cabbage and avocado.
For breakfast, how about Dawn Perry’s recipe for
sour cream and fruit scones
? I love Steven Raichlen’s recipe for
torrijas
, a Spanish-style French toast. Maybe you’d prefer Alison Roman’s recipe for
eggs Benedict
.
Thousands more recipes to cook as summer begins its descent are waiting for you on
New York Times Cooking
. Yes, you need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t done so already, I hope that you will
subscribe today
. Thanks.
You are not alone! If you run into issues with our technology, please reach out:
[email protected]
. Someone will get back to you. Or you can write directly to me if you’d like to yell about something or pay us a compliment:
[email protected]
. I get a lot of mail and can’t respond to every letter. But I do read every one I get.
Now, it’s nothing to do with millet or
pad Thai
, but I’m deep into John Irving’s 2022 novel, “
The Last Chairlift
,” 900 pages of secrets, sex and families. It’s a lot. But it’s pure Irving, funny against the sadness, with plenty of awe — and “aww.”
Here’s Rachel Kushner in Harper’s with “
Street Life
,” a walking meditation worth savoring.
One man’s opinion, but the second season of “
Joe Pickett
” on Paramount+ is better than the first.
Finally, why don’t you join me in my seasonal malaise, listening to Lana Del Rey’s “
Summertime Sadness
” on repeat while you cook? And I’ll see you on Sunday.
|
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