Now he risks becoming a cautionary tale, a victim of what many call a political prosecution and the latest sign of an authoritarian tilt in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy.

Prosecutors have accused Mr. Nadiem of corruption over a contract awarded to Google six years ago, during the Covid pandemic, for laptops to be used by students for remote learning. They allege that the contract, which Mr. Nadiem approved as education minister, was quid pro quo for investments Google had made in his companies years earlier.

Prosecutors said the Google Chromebooks were bought at artificially inflated prices and with unnecessary software licenses, costing the state 2.1 trillion rupiah, or $120 million. Many of the laptops could not be used in remote areas, they said. On Wednesday, they asked a court to sentence Mr. Nadiem to 18 years in prison and pay restitution of 5.6 trillion rupiah to the government, as well as a fine of one billion rupiah.

Neither Google nor any of its executives have been charged with crimes in connection with the case, and the company has denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Nadiem has spent months in detention. In an interview, he called the accusations against him “crazy,” adding, “They could not find any money that came to me.”

He said he believed that he had been targeted because “a lot of people did not like me in the upper echelons of power.” He said he feared not just prison but being “impoverished by the state,” which he worried would seize money that he made before joining the government.

Since taking office 18 months ago, President Prabowo Subianto, a former general, has given the military a bigger role in government and moved to centralize control in his own hands, raising concerns that Indonesia’s relatively young democracy was reverting to its authoritarian past.

He has also launched an aggressive anticorruption crackdown, which critics say he has used in part to fund big government expenditures, like a nationwide school lunch program that he championed. On Wednesday, he stood before cameras in front of piles of cash that he said came from fines imposed in corruption cases.

Todung Mulya Lubis, a prominent human rights lawyer, said the antigraft campaign had led to a string of questionable prosecutions and that Mr. Nadiem’s case “should not even have gone to court.”

Prosecutors say Mr. Nadiem approved the order of Google Chromebooks even though he knew they would not work in remote parts of Indonesia with little or no internet access. Mr. Nadiem has said that he gave the go-ahead after his team recommended choosing the Chromebooks because they were cheaper than other laptops.

On Tuesday, the Jakarta Corruption Court sentenced Ibrahim Arief, a technology consultant whom Mr. Nadiem had hired at the education ministry, to four years in prison, saying his actions in connection with the Google contract had resulted in state losses. Last July, the same court sentenced a former trade minister, Thomas Lembong, a prominent critic of former President Joko Widodo, to four and a half years in prison over a 2015 sugar import deal. (Mr. Prabowo pardoned him in August.)

Mr. Todung, the lawyer, said the cases against both Mr. Nadiem and Mr. Lembong were “extremely weak,” adding that it was a bad idea to prosecute former officials for decisions made in office. “If policy can be criminalized, who would want to be a public official?” he said.

Prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment.

Caesar Sengupta, a former Google executive who worked on the Chromebook contract, predicted that Mr. Nadiem’s prosecution would have a chilling effect on foreign investment. “I’m sure a lot of the U.S. tech companies are looking at Indonesia and are probably saying, ‘Not worth the risk,’” he said.

Mr. Nadiem spoke over Zoom last month from a hospital in Jakarta, where he was being treated for a chronic illness. He looked tired, and an I.V. drip inserted into his hand was visible. His eyes welled up when he talked about his four young children. On Tuesday, the court authorized moving Mr. Nadiem from a detention facility to house arrest because of his medical condition.

He became education minister in 2019, at the invitation of Mr. Joko, who was then the president. It was a controversial choice, because Mr. Nadiem had no experience in education.

He shook things up, including by sidelining many senior officials who had poor reputations. The moves “really caused resentment and hatred,” he said.

Three months into his term, he faced a challenge that schools all over the world were grappling with — learning during a pandemic. He approved the Chromebooks order in June 2020. The program had mixed results: Some studies showed that Chromebooks improved students’ literacy and motivation but were less effective in rural areas.

Dino Patti Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the United States, talked about Mr. Nadiem’s case in a video he posted on Instagram two weeks ago. He said it was an example of “legal tyranny, where the law is not a tool of justice but a weapon used to oppress good people.”

In an interview, Mr. Dino said he had been told by Indonesians overseas that Mr. Nadiem’s case had made them nervous about coming home to work for the government. He added: “The rule of law in Indonesia is problematic.”

Rin Hindryati contributed reporting.

Sui-Lee Wee is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Times, overseeing coverage of 11 countries in the region.

The post A Tech Tycoon’s Prosecution Raises Fears of Authoritarian Overreach appeared first on New York Times.

She buys her milk raw, snacks on sardines, eats authentic sourdough bread — no commercial yeasts here — and generally cooks with locally-sourced ingredients. On TikTok, where she has over 500,000 followers, she claims that her diet “fixed” her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets.

Bundy, a 27-year-old Christian content creator, might sound like your run-of-the-mill clean-eating type, but she believes her diet to be part of a higher calling. For eight years, she has been a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible. She is part of a niche but dedicated online community trying to tie religious values to dietary needs.

In an era when the Make America Healthy Again movement has pushed for more access to unpasteurized dairy products, stricter boundaries around ultraprocessed foods and new definitions for what counts as healthy food, alternative diets focusing on simpler foods are finding popularity, even when their proponents don’t actively consider themselves part of the MAHA movement. Add to that the growing numbers of GLP-1 users struggling to eat enough protein, and biblical diets can offer an appealing repackaging of certain age-old diet tenets. (The new acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who assumed his role on Tuesday, is also a vocal champion for policies to remove chemicals from the food supply.)

“I had never really thought to look to the Bible for a recipe book,” Bundy, who grew up in Michigan and now lives in Bali, said, but after cutting out refined sugar made her feel good, she said, she started “studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating.”

She added: “Sin entered into the world through food, and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back.”

Bundy is open about not having nutrition credentials, but she sells a $28 digital guide to biblical superfoods, as well as coaching sessions that start around $700 for a month, she said.

She’s not the only one. Like other health food influencers, the biblical eating proponents with popular accounts often sell products.

Annalies Xaviera, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Gainesville, Ga., and posts biblical eating tips, said her Facebook following had jumped from scant thousands to over 300,000 in just a few weeks this spring. She sells a digital cookbook.

“The Bible says that God appreciates and celebrates small steps of obedience,” said Xaviera, 32, who added that she did not consider herself part of the MAHA movement, but that some of its goals, like removing artificial dyes from foods, aligned with her own preferences.

She said her approach boiled down to eating whole foods and cooking meals at home. She still buys some processed foods, like pasta.

Eating biblically — which can mean strictly sticking to the good book’s ingredients, cooking from scratch or anything in between — is not new. “The Eden Diet,” a 2008 book, offered weight loss and nutrition tips rooted in biblical teachings. The author Jordan Rubin’s 2004 book “The Maker’s Diet” was a best seller (as was his recent book “The Biblio Diet,” coauthored with Josh Axe, a support of the MAHA movement, and published last year).

For years, some Christians have also participated in “Daniel fasts,” 21-day fasts based on the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, in which Daniel consumes only vegetables and water. (There’s also, of course, the long tradition of religious diets, such as keeping kosher or halal, or following a Levitical diet. Jesus, himself, presumably kept kosher.)

On social media, however, biblical eating has appeared to have a resurgence in recent months.

A few years ago, the actor Chris Pratt talked about completing a Daniel fast when he was on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” In January, as part of his partnership with the prayer app Hallow, he posted a video encouraging his followers to use the app to participate in a fast and prayer challenge. The bean-heavy fast had made him quite gassy, he said with a laugh. Other celebrities, including Mark Wahlberg and Patricia Heaton, have been part of similar efforts with the app.

Casper Schimmer, a college student in Amsterdam, said he sold coaching sessions for young, Christian men looking to align their diet and exercise with their faith.

“It’s not like eating healthy only is what makes a godly person,” Schimmer, 20, said. He said he also focused on physical and mental fitness as part of a larger system of “godly habits.” (For example, sabbath as the “original biohack.”)

Jennifer R. Ayres, a religious education professor at Emory University, said the biblical food movement online seemed to show “a focus on personal decision making.” She added that “the more collective and environmental analysis of what’s happening in our food system” is missing from some of the social media dialogue.

Abbie Stasior, a Christian dietitian who lives in Nashville, said much of her work looked, at first, like standard nutrition guidance. She often starts with clients by talking about the importance of breakfast. But then she’ll reference Bible verses, pointing, for example, to a scene in the Book of John in which Jesus eats a balanced breakfast of bread and fish with his disciples. “He’s got carbs and protein,” Stasior, 31, said.

Tying dietary counsel to scripture offers “an extra incentive,” Stasior said.

When it comes to meeting nutrition needs, Dr. Marion Nestle, one of the country’s foremost nutrition policy experts, said that if people on the biblical diet consume ample calories and eat “a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods,” they are “probably doing just fine.”

She also described how wellness culture had been colliding with policy.

“The thing about wellness is that it’s based on personal experience rather than science — it’s what makes you feel good,” Nestle said, adding: “Diet is about belief. We don’t have a lot of belief systems left in this country. People are desperate for meaning in their lives.”

Xaviera, the stay-at-home mother in Georgia, said she encouraged her followers to pause before eating, describing a person who might be deciding whether to eat a cookie.

“When you’re in a craving,” she said, “have you ever thought to stop and pray?”

Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.

The post Eating Healthy? No, They’re Eating Biblically. appeared first on New York Times.

“Beauty,” Macron declared, “will save the world.”

Two days after the museum opened, one of its beautiful objects began drawing attention from scholars, but not in the way that Macron might have hoped. It was an immaculately preserved rose-granite slab, or stele, inscribed with a royal decree from the pharaoh Tutankhamun. The stele dated to about 1318 B.C.E., closer to the boy-king’s death than any other surviving monument. It stood at five and a half feet, and the engravings—Tut offers wine to the god Osiris on one side of the slab, and accepts bouquets from a priest on the other—were unlike anything scholars had previously seen.

What puzzled experts was that a Tut stele this astonishing could emerge, as if from nowhere, a century after the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the pharaoh’s tomb. “Does anyone know ANYTHING about this?” a Giza-based Egyptologist tweeted. The museum’s label for the stele, she added, was “a masterclass in saying almost nothing.”

Marc Gabolde, an acclaimed Tut scholar at France’s Paul Valéry University, in Montpellier, pressed the museum’s French advisers for an explanation. They told him that a German merchant-navy officer named Johannes Behrens had bought the stele from a little-known Egyptian dealer, Habib Tawadros, in 1933. It had remained in Behrens’s family until shortly before the museum acquired it, in 2016, for more than $9 million.

Gabolde received the museum’s permission to write the first scholarly paper on the stele, but something about its provenance continued to bother him. Germany’s economy was in shambles in 1933. Gabolde wondered how a merchant-navy man could have afforded a monument of Egypt’s most celebrated pharaoh. He searched historical records but found no evidence of Behrens’s existence.

Events in America soon deepened his concerns. In February 2019, a Manhattan prosecutor seized a golden mummy coffin from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, concluding that it had been looted in Egypt in 2011, during the Arab Spring—and that papers documenting its provenance had been forged. Gabolde noticed that the coffin’s sales history partly resembled that of the stele: Habib Tawadros was again listed as the original owner. If Tawadros had never actually owned the coffin, might the stele’s history also be a lie? Gabolde came to a disturbing conclusion. “Whole stories,” he wrote in his research notes, “seem to have been made up to hide the exact provenance of the artefacts.”

In their billion-dollar agreement with the Emiratis, the French had pledged to “pay careful attention to the ethical rules regarding acquisitions, in particular regarding provenance.” Helping guide those acquisitions was the most powerful museum official in Europe: Jean-Luc Martinez, the president and director of the Paris Louvre. The year before the stele’s purchase, Martinez, an archaeologist, had written a 50-point plan for protecting antiquities in conflict zones, and he’d warned of traffickers who “invent a story” for looted objects to disguise their illicit origins. They could “claim it was found by a great-grandfather who was a diplomat, fabricate fake notary documents to lend credibility to the lie,” Martinez wrote.

Could a bogus story about the Tut stele have duped him just months later?

In 2021, Gabolde stepped off an airplane in Paris to find the national police waiting for him. They took him to their headquarters in Nanterre, where officers interrogated him for hours about his research into the stele’s origins. “They told me it was a huge affair,” Gabolde recalled, “something far beyond my understanding.” The police had begun to unravel a criminal network stretching from the deserts of Egypt to the largest museums in the world. From 2013 to 2018, traffickers had sold the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi some $65 million worth of allegedly looted artifacts. Among them was the Tut stele, the golden coffin, and a colossal marble head of a Ptolemaic queen, purported to be Cleopatra, purchased for about $40 million—the highest known price a museum has ever paid for a single antiquity.

At the center of the deals, mostly hidden from sight, was a family with warehouses full of magnificent artifacts and a knack for outrunning the law.

One day in the 1960s, a little boy entered a jewelry shop in Cairo and held out an ancient scarab amulet. “You want to buy it?” he asked the proprietor.

Simon Simonian, who ran the shop with his brother Hagop, dealt in modern jewelry but was intrigued enough by the ornament to accept the boy’s offer. “My father purchased it for little and he sold it for a big profit,” Simon’s son Kevork told me.  Sensing a financial opportunity, Simon called one of his younger brothers, Serop, who was studying business at a university in Germany.

Study Egyptology instead, Simon told him.

Serop was one of Simon’s five siblings, a bookish middle child who collected stamps and lived in the shadow of his eldest brother. Their father, Ohan, had fled Turkey on foot as a boy, after his parents were murdered in the Armenian genocide. When he arrived in Egypt, a relative told me, he begged for food and slept in trash bins before getting a job as a busboy, buying a truck, and eventually founding his own transportation business. Losing his parents at such a young age caused him lifelong anguish. But Ohan gave his children chances he’d never had, and they learned to seize them.

When Serop got Simon’s call, he did as he was told. He switched to Egyptology, wrote a dissertation on coffin design, and received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1974.

It was an ideal time to be in the Egyptian-antiquities business. In the early 1960s, Jackie Kennedy, as first lady, had inaugurated the first major tour of Tutankhamun artifacts, a small collection that attracted giant crowds. It was soon followed by a far bigger exhibition, “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which showcased the pharaoh’s gold death mask and fueled a craze that critics called “Egyptomania.” The show’s nine-year world tour, which began in 1972, would draw about 7 million people in the U.S. alone. During its four months at the Met, museum goers poured $500 million, in today’s dollars, into hotels, restaurants, and other New York businesses. Steve Martin’s 1978 single, “King Tut,” which parodied the era’s obsession with the pharaoh, sold more than 1 million copies.

Serop Simonian wasn’t an extraordinary Egyptology student, a teacher in his program recalled, but it didn’t much matter: He was now Herr Doktor Simonian, and had a network of influential scholars and museum directors. He hadn’t even finished his degree when, in 1970, through a Paris broker, he sold the Louvre a 4,000-year-old acacia statue of the Egyptian high priest Hapdjefai.

In 1976, he opened a shop called Galerie Antiker Kunst in a wealthy district of Hamburg, and began loaning antiquities to German universities. He knew that professors would relish the chance to publish papers on previously unknown artifacts. Their articles, in turn, increased the value of his objects. An Egyptologist named Jürgen Horn described a papyrus bearing verses from the Book of Isaiah as “breathtaking,” writing to Simonian that he hoped “this information will help you in your difficult negotiations.” Another German professor called the papyrus “a sensation.” These endorsements, an American scholar of early Christianity wrote to a colleague, “explain why the price doubled.”

Serop had become precisely what his older brothers had hoped: a respectable figure, with the ties and training to sell the family’s artifacts, at staggering prices, to insatiable Western markets.

One of the first people to notice anything amiss was an American art historian named Eleni Vassilika. It was the summer of 2000, and Vassilika—who’d spent a decade as an antiquities curator at the University of Cambridge—had just started a new job as the director of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, in the provincial German city of Hildesheim. She quickly discovered that dozens of Egyptian relics the museum presented to the public as its own were in fact the merchandise of a dealer named Serop Simonian. Two of his artifacts—a 4,000-year-old model boat and a 2,300-year-old coffin—had even appeared on the covers of exhibition catalogs for the museum’s traveling shows.

It wasn’t uncommon for museums to display objects from collectors, with labels identifying the pieces as loans. But to exhibit the stock of a dealer—and to do so without disclosure—struck Vassilika as a form of laundering. It allowed a dealer to hide his ownership of potentially dubious antiquities from the public and law enforcement, yet quietly present them to buyers as museum-worthy. (Lara Weiss, the Roemer and Pelizaeus’s director since 2023, told me the museum would not approve such a relationship today and “would consider it laundering.”)

The state of some of Simonian’s wares made the arrangement all the more bizarre. An ancient statue of Osiris “had been restored from head to toe,” with “large parts” added that “did not correspond to its original condition,” a conservator at the museum later told investigators. Coffins, meanwhile, appeared to have been reassembled from modular pieces; the conservator suspected that they’d been sawed apart in Egypt so that government inspectors wouldn’t recognize them as protected artifacts.

By then, the West’s fascination with ancient Egypt had fueled waves of looting. In just the first three months of 1973, as the giant Tutankhamun tour got under way, Egyptian tombs were robbed of millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities. Egypt had so many buried artifacts and so few guards, the Associated Press reported, that “99 percent of all lootings go undiscovered.” To fight the trafficking of cultural property, UNESCO had adopted a major treaty in 1970. Then, in 1983, Egyptian lawmakers fully criminalized the antiquities trade, barring all sales and exports.

Yet there had been no discernible interruption in the Simonians’ business. The brothers had a ready explanation: They’d acquired their antiquities in the ’60s and early ’70s, they said, from the heirs of Habib Tawadros and another Egyptian dealer, Sayed Pasha Khashaba. “Everything,” Serop later told investigators, had been shipped to Switzerland by 1973, a full decade before Egypt outlawed the trade. A family member described this cache to me as an “infinite supply.”

Simonian’s relationship with the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, which began no later than 1990, was off the books: There was no contract, no insurance, no notification to the city, which owned the museum. When city officials finally learned of the arrangement, in 1999, they grew alarmed. But Vassilika’s predecessor, who was a friend of Simonian’s, talked them down. He told them that the dealer was best seen as a quiet benefactor whose antiquities were drawing visitors and helping fund the museum’s new building. The city’s leaders seemed appeased, and soon agreed to Simonian’s demand that the museum buy some of his artifacts, in return for his loans to the traveling shows. When city administrators questioned Simonian’s prices, the museum director again allayed their concerns—by obtaining appraisals from Ursula Rössler-Köhler, a former classmate of Simonian’s who’d become head of the Egyptology institute at the University of Bonn. Of the help that she gave Simonian, Rössler-Köhler later told investigators, “We were happy to do this and were then able to keep some of these pieces on loan for our own small exhibition.”

Vassilika was appalled by the city’s naivete. She ordered the removal of Simonian’s objects—about 100 of them—from the museum’s warehouse and tried, in vain, to halt the purchases.  

When she left the museum in 2005, at the end of her five-year contract, Vassilika hoped never to think about Simonian again. She’d been offered a job as the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, whose 40,000-piece collection was regarded as the most important outside Egypt. The city was preparing to host the 2006 Winter Olympics, and a local banking foundation, the Compagnia di San Paolo, had pledged about $30 million for the museum’s renovation. With the encouragement of Italy’s culture minister, the Compagnia had also acquired an eight-foot papyrus roll from the first century B.C.E. It appeared to contain the only known copy of a work by the Greek geographer Artemidorus and the oldest surviving map from the Greco-Roman world. The foundation planned to exhibit the Artemidorus at a nobleman’s palazzo during the Olympics, then donate it to the Egyptian Museum.

Vassilika was fascinated by the papyrus, which she’d never heard of. Who was the seller? she asked her boss.

Her boss called the Compagnia and handed the phone to Vassilika.

“This piece was legally exported from Egypt by an Armenian family in the 1970s,” she recalled a foundation official telling her.

She felt her ears ring and the blood drain from her face. “You don’t mean Serop Simonian?”

He did. The Compagnia had acquired it from the Hamburg dealer for $3 million—the highest known price ever paid for a papyrus.

By the 2000s, the Simonians had amassed tens of thousands of artifacts in warehouses across Europe and North America. So numerous and varied were the objects that the family could serve nearly every market, from multimillion-dollar deals with museums to two-figure bargains on eBay. Most elite dealers shunned cheap objects, but for the Simonians, a sale was a sale. The range of price points was “unprecedented for a single network,” an American law-enforcement official told me.

The only bar to still greater profits, it seemed, was Serop himself. With his degree and connections, he’d supplanted his brothers as the de facto head of the family business. But he had little in the way of glamour or charm. Plump, shabbily dressed, and unshaven, he lived in what another dealer described to me as “kind of your grandmother’s apartment in the 1950s.” He was so loath to spend money that he stayed in budget hotels and had a habit, according to a business associate, of “re-toasting old bread so as not to waste it.” He was still haunted by the poverty of his first years in Germany, when he’d lived in a building with shared bathrooms and had little to eat. “He didn’t want to go back to the same place,” Simon’s son Ohan told me.

The one time Vassilika met him, to discuss his antiquities, Serop showed up at her museum office disheveled, slouching, and smelling of cigarettes—a manner wholly unlike that of the urbane, well-groomed men who dominated the trade. “He just looked shaggy,” Vassilika recalled. “He didn’t look like an art dealer, you know, an upmarket art dealer.”

Of his reputation as a salesman, Gabriele Pieke, a German Egyptologist and museum official, recalled, “Tricks and tricks, like someone who wants to get more money out of you.” She likened him to sellers in a souk or bazaar. “If it’s not in your character to bargain, then it’s really annoying.”

Simonian was prickly and easily aggrieved, which made dealing with him even more challenging. “He didn’t really feel people respected him enough,” Noele Mele, a Connecticut dealer who brokered pieces for him, told me. Buyers would sometimes agree to Simonian’s asking price, only for him to suddenly raise it, out of spite for some perceived insult. “He’d say, ‘It’s your fault; you should have gotten it in writing,’” Mele recalled. “The next time, we did get it in writing. He said, ‘So what?’ and tore it up.” He eventually grew estranged from his wife and children, while forming what the business associate said were emotional attachments to the antiquities in his storerooms. “My babies,” he called them.

In 2011, Simonian reached an agreement with the Reiss Engelhorn Museum, in Mannheim, Germany, to display thousands of his artifacts, apparently including the Cleopatra bust, for up to 30 years. But by 2013, the museum had backed out, citing Simonian’s failure to supply provenance paperwork and his refusal to allow laboratory testing to determine the age of his objects. “No one wanted to deal with him,” Mele told me.

To sell to the world’s greatest museums, Simonian needed help. In the early 2000s, a pair of Lebanese antiquities dealers introduced him to their son Roben Dib, who was studying biomedical engineering at the University of Hamburg. Dib was in his 20s—nearly four decades Simonian’s junior—but he’d collected coins since he was a boy and had a natural savoir faire. Several years later, Simonian offered him a job, and Dib accepted, thrilled by the idea of turning his hobby into a career.

In 2011, Dib traveled to the Paris auction house Pierre Bergé and introduced himself to its archaeological expert Christophe Kunicki, one of France’s foremost authorities on Egyptian art. Kunicki moved among museum-world Brahmin. “When he’s not organizing sales,” the French newspaper Libération wrote, “he scours major international fairs and rubs shoulders with the elite of the art market, between Paris, New York, London, and Geneva. Always at his side, his husband and collaborator, Richard Semper, perfectly bilingual in English.” The couple regularly hosted dinners for Louvre and Met curators, who were “always delighted to be the first to discover new treasures.” Dib brought small artifacts to Kunicki, gaining his trust, before offering him larger and more legally questionable ones.

In 2015, Kunicki grew smitten with a spectacular coffin Dib showed him in a warehouse in Cologne. Sheathed in gold and covered in hieroglyphs, it had once contained the mummified corpse of Nedjemankh, a first-century-B.C.E. priest of the ram-headed fertility god Heryshef. Kunicki had the coffin professionally photographed, and in May 2016 he emailed the pictures to Diana Patch, the chief curator of Egyptian art at the Met. Might the museum be interested?

When Patch asked for provenance documents, Kunicki sent a scan of what he said was an Egyptian export license, issued to Simon Simonian in 1971. Janice Kamrin, a curator on Patch’s staff, emailed the Egyptian government that the license had “all the proper stamps” and “looks right to us” but that the museum wanted to confirm its authenticity “as part of our due diligence.” When an Egyptian official requested “all the data and pics,” Kamrin asked if sending just the license number and year would suffice. It didn’t: The Egyptians wanted a copy of the license that Kamrin had claimed looked right. According to an official summary of a Manhattan grand-jury investigation, Kamrin puzzlingly replied that she didn’t have copies, “electronic or otherwise”—despite the fact that Kunicki had emailed Patch a scan of the license months earlier.

Patch, meanwhile, pressed the dealers. She insisted in an email that for the sale to proceed, “we of course will require the original export license.” But Patch never got the original—the dealers made a series of baffling excuses—and Egyptian officials stopped answering Kamrin’s emails. Still, in May 2017, Patch and Kamrin recommended the coffin’s purchase to the Met’s director. When senior Egyptian officials learned of the museum’s plans to go through with the acquisition, they again requested a copy of the export license. The dealers had sent Patch two copies of it—one in which Simon Simonian’s name was visible, and another in which it was blacked out. Kunicki asked Patch to send Egypt “the copy without the names.” According to the summary of the grand-jury investigation, Patch complied—depriving Egypt of a key detail about the coffin’s origins. Soon after, in July 2017, the Met acquired the coffin, for about $4 million.

The gilded coffin of Nedjemankh became a sensation. Kim Kardashian, in a gold Versace gown, posed for photos beside it at the 2018 Met Gala. Two months later, the museum made the coffin the centerpiece of an exhibition that drew nearly half a million visitors.

If museum directors had wanted the truth about the Simonians, they could have gotten it from Egyptian officials—or done some basic research. On microfilm at the Library of Congress, I found a series of disquieting articles in Egypt’s Al-Ahram, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential newspapers. The first, from January 1975, was headlined “Armenian Jeweler Killed on the Bank of a Canal in Saqqara.”

The dead jeweler was Serop’s younger brother, Abraham Simonian. His bloodied, half-naked body had been found with bullet wounds near a hut where he’d parked his Mercedes. The newspaper reported that although Simon, Hagop, and Abraham were nominally in the jewelry business, their primary activity was “buying stolen artifacts and selling and smuggling them abroad.” Abraham, who was 28, “had frequented numerous archaeological sites throughout the republic,” seeking “antiquities wherever they might be found.”  

A colleague of the Simonians told me that Serop, wanting more business for himself, had Abraham make deals behind their older brothers’ backs. At one point, Abraham gave Serop a photo of a Book of the Dead, a collection of spells for the afterlife, which Serop showed to a professor in Germany. “The professor told him, ‘It’s important—go and buy,’” the colleague said. The Simonians paid the Egyptians who had dug it up the rough equivalent of $7,000. Then, according to Al-Ahram, the Simonians sold the book in Germany for more than 30 times that amount. After the diggers learned of this profit—and of how little of it they’d gotten—a fight erupted, and they shot Abraham with his own gun.

By then, Egyptian law enforcement had known of the Simonians for perhaps a decade. In the 1960s, a relative told me, Simon spent two years in prison for alleged antiquities crimes, and lost teeth in an attack by fellow inmates. In 1971, he was stripped of his antiquities license after registering in his own name the shop of Habib Tawadros, the dealer the Simonians would later claim owned both the Met’s gilded coffin and the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Tut stele.

Simon and Hagop left Egypt for Los Angeles and Montreal, respectively, in the early-to-mid-’80s, around the time the country abolished its antiquities trade. In 1989, Canadian authorities seized about 60 illicit antiquities from Hagop—some “taken” from excavations, according to Al-Ahram. Six years later, an Egyptian court sentenced Simon in absentia to five years of hard labor for trying to smuggle at least 100 antiquities out of the country with forged government documents.

In 2005, a Berlin judge halted a shipment of Simonian artifacts to a buyer in the United States, after Egyptian authorities linked the objects to dealers who’d bribed a senior official in Egypt’s antiquities ministry. But the judge’s decision was soon reversed, and the artifacts—funerary relics exhibited at the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in the 1990s—were sold, for more than $2 million, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, where they remain today. (The Nelson-Atkins declined to comment on Egypt’s allegations.)

For eight years, Eleni Vassilika had kept the Artemidorus papyrus out of Turin’s Egyptian Museum, her intransigence infuriating her superiors. In 2018, four years after her departure, Italian prosecutors declared both the papyrus and a key provenance document fake. Serop Simonian, they alleged, had committed aggravated fraud, a crime made easier by the carelessness of the Compagnia and of the scholars who’d facilitated the purchase. But it was too late to charge Simonian, they said: The statute of limitations had lapsed. (The Compagnia did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Artemidorus remains the only known Simonian relic deemed a forgery. Some others were crudely restored, with slapdash handiwork or ill-fitting parts cannibalized from other antiquities. But by and large, the family’s objects are seen as genuine. The problem is not their authenticity, but their origins.

In the fall of 2017, a Lebanese collector named Georges Lotfi was strolling through the Met’s Egyptian galleries when he noticed a new acquisition: the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh. The more closely he examined it, the surer he became that he’d seen it before. About five years earlier, Lotfi told me, a Jordanian trafficker named Mohammed “Abu Said” Jaradat had offered it to him for $50,000. Lotfi had passed. But after his visit to the Met, he called Jaradat and asked what had become of the coffin. Jaradat said he’d sent it to a German dealer named Roben Dib, who had promised to split the proceeds of any sale. Jaradat had heard nothing since.

“Abu Said,” Lotfi responded, “it’s in the Metropolitan Museum.”

Jaradat was livid. The Met had paid $4 million, and Jaradat hadn’t gotten a penny. “He wanted to take revenge,” Lotfi told me.  

In March 2018, Lotfi tipped off Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor who leads the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. Bogdanos recognized the names Dib and Jaradat. About five years earlier, he had come across emails from them in the inboxes of several New York collectors and museum officials he was investigating in a different case. The emails contained what Bogdanos called “dirty photos”: images of dirt-encrusted antiquities, the sort that thieves send to buyers to prove that a relic is fresh from the ground and thus not a fake; the mindset, as Bogdanos describes it, is If it’s looted, it’s real. To investigate further, Bogdanos’s team served search warrants in 2013 on Dib’s and Jaradat’s email accounts, obtaining thousands of messages. But he couldn’t seize the antiquities in their “dirty photos” without knowing where the objects were.

Not until Lotfi’s tip, five years later, did Bogdanos get a break. Lotfi introduced Bogdanos to Jaradat, and the prosecutor found corroboration for Jaradat’s golden-coffin story in the seized email accounts: In late 2011 and early 2012, a looter had sent six dirty images of the coffin to Jaradat, who forwarded them to Dib. Metadata showed that the photos were taken in Egypt’s Minya region in autumn 2011, just months after a rash of antiquities looting during the Arab Spring. A photo emailed to Jaradat appeared to depict one of the traffickers: a man in a hoodie, crouched on a sand dune, with an assault rifle across his chest.

“When is the big yellow one going to get here?” Simonian asked Dib in a September 2012 Gmail chat, using their code name for the golden coffin, according to the summary of the grand-jury investigation.

“Early October it will be ready for the EU,” Dib replied. The coffin was smuggled from Egypt to Dubai, then sent by FedEx to an old friend of Simonian’s, a shipping agent who lived near the Cologne warehouse where the relic would be stored. The FedEx label, found in Dib’s email, described the multimillion-dollar Egyptian coffin as a “gypsum Wooden Box and lid” from Turkey, with a value of 5,000 euros.

From speaking with Simonian’s associates and reading court papers and other legal documents, I got the sense that Simonian had a system. He put almost nothing in writing. He used intermediaries and an offshore shell company to obscure his role in sales. He had artifacts shipped to friends, freight forwarders, and small museums such as the Roemer and Pelizaeus, where—a museum official there told investigators—he had her go into a customs office to complete paperwork on his behalf, while he stayed in the car and smoked. He once bragged to a colleague of his near invisibility: “I run beside my shadow.”

[From the December 2021 issue: Ariel Sabar on the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit]

When Bogdanos reviewed the Met’s internal communications, he was dumbfounded. By the time Diana Patch, the Met’s chief curator of Egyptian art, recommended the purchase, the Paris dealers had given the museum no fewer than three provenance stories: one in which the current owner was a “Mme Chatz” of Switzerland, another in which it was an “M.D.” of Germany, and a third in which the owner was Serop Simonian. Still more suspicious, one date on the license suggested that it had been issued in May 1961, while another suggested May 1971. Neither could be reconciled with a government stamp that said Arab Republic of Egypt, a name Egypt didn’t adopt until September 1971.

Manhattan prosecutors didn’t charge anyone at the Met, but in February 2019, Bogdanos’s team convinced a judge that the museum likely possessed stolen property in the first degree. Agents seized the coffin with a search warrant and, with the Met’s cooperation, returned it to Egypt. Then they found and repatriated five other antiquities that the Met had recently acquired, for more than $3 million, from the same network. Two had bogus Khashaba or Behrens provenance; another was described as having been sold by a Dutch gallery nine years before the gallery opened. A fourth piece—a Roman-era portrait of a woman—was looted from Egypt in the 1990s, according to Manhattan prosecutors, but the sellers evidently needed another story. “Hehe, it should come from you, the Simonian family,” Dib allegedly wrote in a Gmail chat. “No,” Simonian replied. So they attributed it to a friend, who they claimed purchased it in 1968 from a Munich gallery.

A Met spokesperson told me that the museum was “the victim of a fraud” and had “filed a complaint in the criminal legal proceedings in Paris.” Asked about the conduct of Patch and Kamrin, the spokesperson described the coffin’s acquisition in 2017 as a “museum decision, supported by a multi-step institutional process in place at the time.” After the coffin’s repatriation, in 2019, the Met “undertook a thorough review of its process for verifying documentation and approving acquisitions, and then strengthened requirements for acquiring antiquities.” The spokesperson declined to answer more detailed questions, citing the “ongoing, strictly confidential proceedings in France.”

This was hardly the Met’s first provenance scandal. The museum returned a cache of relics to Turkey in 1993 and a stunning Greek vase to Italy in 2008—each of which it had purchased, for at least $1 million, months after they’d been excavated by tomb robbers. The Manhattan D.A.’s office says that it has seized more than 200 antiquities, valued at more than $54 million, from the museum since 2023. In 2024, the Met hired its first-ever head of provenance research, who oversees a team of 12 analysts that in partnership with outside experts, including the D.A.’s office, is reviewing objects in the museum’s collection from problematic dealers.

So would the Met continue to buy antiquities—as it had the gilded coffin—without original export licenses and without the country of origin’s confirmation that relics were legal? The museum spokesperson told me that the guidelines the Met follows do not include those “conditions” but that it would make every effort to verify documents, including by contacting people connected to them. Diana Patch and Janice Kamrin did not respond to requests for comment.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi had made an even more enticing target for Simonian’s network than the Met. The Emiratis had allotted hundreds of millions of dollars to building a world-class collection within a decade. Antiquities worthy of their ambitions had proved difficult to find, according to internal documents seen by Libération, because of “heightened sensitivity” about provenance. This tougher environment didn’t deter traffickers so much as inspire them: If they faked legal provenance, they could command astronomical prices—precisely because of how few legal objects were on the market. From 2014 to 2018, Simonian’s network sold the Louvre Abu Dhabi at least seven Egyptian antiquities for more than $50 million, among them the Tut stele, the Cleopatra head, and a hippopotamus figurine originally displayed by the Roemer and Pelizaeus. (The Louvre Abu Dhabi declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigations.)

European police discovered that Simonian and his associates had allegedly fabricated early-20th-century sales records with an old typewriter—the same one Simonian used to write his dissertation—and blank invoices from long-dead dealers such as Tawadros. The traffickers then paid friends and other “witnesses” to claim, in notarized letters, that they’d inherited the objects from ancestors such as Behrens, the supposed merchant-navy officer. Simonian’s two adult children, meanwhile, had their own provenance story: that they owned the Cleopatra head and the Tut stele, and had gotten the artifacts from their grandmother. Their story, which appears in certain back-end sales paperwork, made it possible for 30 million euros in sales proceeds to flow directly into their accounts, bypassing their elderly father and effecting a massive, intergenerational transfer of wealth.

Kunicki and Semper, the Paris middlemen who’d brokered the sale of Simonian objects to the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, were charged in 2020 with fraud, money laundering, and forgery. French journalists, quoting confidential police files, reported that Kunicki admitted to using forged paperwork to fill in “missing links” in ownership. In the antiquities world, Semper suggested, due diligence was a kind of knowing pantomime in which “everyone is putting a bag over their head.” He alluded to a French schoolyard game in which children stare into each other’s eyes and try not to be the first to laugh. (Kunicki and Semper deny wrongdoing, their lawyer told me.)

To determine how high the conspiracy went, French police scrutinized the conduct of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s advisers. Among them was France’s most prominent critic of archaeological looting: Jean-Luc Martinez, whom French president François Hollande had appointed in 2013 to lead the Paris Louvre. In his 2015 report on safeguarding antiquities in conflict zones—commissioned by Hollande and submitted to UNESCO—Martinez urged museums “to systematically refuse any proposal to acquire works whose provenance is not certain.” He described nearly all the “laundering techniques” that traffickers used: fake ownership histories, middlemen, attempts to exhibit looted objects in prestigious museums “to enhance the artwork’s reputation and reassure potential buyers,” long waits before stolen relics appear on the market to give “dealers time to fabricate provenance.” Yet in helping the Louvre Abu Dhabi acquire antiquities, Martinez, along with other French advisers, apparently missed, or ignored, these very problems.

The police concluded that the Agence France-Muséums—the body that France created to advise the Emirati museum—had become “a formidable tool at the disposal of traffickers.” Though Martinez isn’t thought to have personally profited from the deals, the Emiratis’ payments to France helped fund major renovations at the Paris Louvre, including a roughly $60 million project to improve the flow of visitors through the reception areas beneath the glass pyramid. Martinez was charged in 2022 with complicity in fraud and money laundering. (Martinez’s lawyer, François Artuphel, told me that Martinez was one of six members of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions committee, which made decisions collectively and was not expected to verify the provenance documents provided by sellers. Artuphel called Martinez a victim of “alleged counterfeiters,” and believes his client will be “fully exonerated.”)

Roben Dib was charged in France in 2022 with criminal conspiracy, organized fraud, and money laundering. His attorneys didn’t respond to a list of questions, but Dib has previously professed his innocence. A French defense lawyer associated with the trafficking cases told me that the dealers were being asked to prove legal ownership from the day an object was unearthed through the present, an almost impossible standard, particularly for discoveries that precede modern record-keeping practices.

Serop Simonian was 81 years old in September 2023 when he was extradited from Germany to France and charged there with criminal association, money laundering, and organized fraud. Detained in Paris’s La Santé prison, he made statements to investigators that were by turns boastful, contemptuous, and self-pitying. Simonian hinted that his family had sold a statue to John Lennon. He called Bogdanos “the greatest art thief of all time,” mocking the prosecutor’s seizures from dealers and museums. He suggested that missing sales paperwork simply reflected an earlier era’s looser standards of documentation. He denied possessing illicit antiquities, then taunted his inquisitors: If they really cared about illegal provenance, he said, “I could empty half the Louvre.” Finally, he asserted that he was suffering from dementia and that Dib had become the decision maker: “I trusted him more than I trusted my children.”

Simonian’s French attorney, Chloé Arnoux, visited her client in prison in late 2024. She told me that he struggled to speak without losing his breath, used a walker, and slept in a cell with two young inmates, “who were not really that sympathetic to him.” That December, after more than a year in detention, he was released by a judge, who cited the octogenarian’s declining health. Prosecutors successfully appealed, calling Simonian a flight risk. But he had already left France, by bus, and checked into an assisted-living center in Hamburg. He’s unlikely to be re-extradited to France until his trial, lawyers close to the case told me. (For their roles in antiquities sales, Simonian’s son, Abraham, is being prosecuted in Germany on charges of fraud and receiving stolen goods, and Simonian’s daughter, Alice, on a charge of money laundering. Their lawyers deny the charges, saying their clients had no awareness that the provenance provided to buyers was allegedly false.)

In many months of trying to speak with Serop Simonian, I received just two responses: a completely blank message from his email address, and a WhatsApp call from a number associated with him in which someone breathed heavily for a few seconds before hanging up. Days spent looking for him in Hamburg yielded only dead ends. His lawyers didn’t respond to detailed lists of questions.

Serop’s brother Simon died in 2020, and Hagop didn’t respond to interview requests, but I found Simon’s son Ohan, who is in his early 50s, in California. We spent part of an afternoon together in the Coachella Valley. His arms were sleeved in tattoos: an Egyptian ankh, an Eye of God inside a pyramid, the face of Jesus over the words In God We Trust. Growing up in Egypt in the 1980s, he told me, he’d been teased by the Armenian kids he played basketball with. “You guys robbed a pyramid,” they’d say. “You stole half of Egypt.” In truth, Ohan insisted, his father was not a thief but a rescuer, saving the marvels of his homeland “for the world to see.”

Unlike his brother Serop, Simon openly enjoyed his money, frittering it away on parties, vacations, trips to Las Vegas. Where Serop wanted to be “the elite behind the curtain,” Ohan told me, “my dad was, Look at me! I’m Simon!” Ohan and his brother, Kevork, both went through bankruptcy in recent years and have driven for Uber to support their families. They’ve spent years seeking the $11 million they say Serop still owes them for their late father’s share of the $40 million Cleopatra head. Simon once flew all the way to Hamburg to collect his cut, refusing to believe that his own brother would steal from him. But Serop pretended to be out of town, and Simon died soon after.

Talking about this debt made Ohan so furious that he began loudly cursing his uncle. Death, Ohan fears, will be Serop’s final escape. “If I had the choice to be a god,” Ohan told me, “I’d be the god of the afterlife, so I could go after him.”

In December 2020, Eleni Vassilika was weathering the pandemic in her London home when she received an email from Germany’s federal police. “We are sorry you had to wait so long before being contacted by us,” the agent wrote. Vassilika was thankful for their interest in Simonian. But what about the Egyptologists who had blithely endorsed his objects? What about the museums that had rushed to buy them? Germany, France, and the United States were among the nearly 150 countries who signed the 1970 UNESCO treaty to fight the illicit antiquities trade. Museums had promised reforms and hired provenance sleuths. Scholars had adopted ethics codes to constrain their contacts with dealers. Yet tens of millions of dollars in loot were still making their way into the world’s most illustrious museums.

“The story is the enablers—it’s us,” Vassilika told me. “Museums and scholars are the moral compass of art history and the art world. We should be, at least.”

After Simonian’s arrest, I asked, did she and her staff discuss whether to continue exhibiting his objects? “Of course,” Weiss said. But the museum was in such financial trouble, she said, that it nearly closed in 2022, and “the important thing” was to survive. The museum had no plans to identify Simonian as the objects’ prior owner. The new galleries, she said, were designed for families and children, and “in this context, there is not really room for long labels about provenance, because we want easy texts, few texts, and not long and difficult academic narratives.

“I mean, I see this can be criticized,” she continued, as if suddenly realizing how this might sound. “But this is the decision we have taken at the moment because we really need more visitors.”

The post The Secrets of the Sarcophagus Dealer appeared first on The Atlantic.

This all-or-nothing approach to exercise is common and keeps many people from meeting their fitness goals, said Michelle Segar, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan.

In a small recent study, Dr. Segar and her co-authors found that, when subjects weren’t able to work out in the exact way they wanted, they often did nothing instead. While having an all-or-nothing mind-set has been studied more extensively in other contexts, it hasn’t been formally studied much in relation to exercise until recently. But Dr. Segar argues that it can be a major barrier to forming an exercise habit. She calls it the “perfect workout trap.”

The trap can take different forms, she said. It can prevent people from getting started, if they’re waiting for the stars to align so they can exercise in one specific way, and it can also prevent them from maintaining a fitness routine. But for most, the key to starting a fitness habit — and sticking with it — isn’t more discipline, it’s more flexibility, she said.

People often blame themselves when they fall short of their exercise goals, she said, but this kind of all-or-nothing thinking is often baked into popular messaging around exercise.

Many fitness influencers and trainers promote a “no excuses” approach to fitness, and some popular challenges like 75 Hard and “streaking” stipulate that, if you miss one workout, you have to start from scratch. But for some people who struggle to exercise, the medical recommendation that adults do a minimum of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise and two strength training sessions a week can feel out of reach, and end up discouraging them, said Rick Richey, a master trainer for the National Academy of Sports Medicine who is based in New York. “People see that and they go, ‘Well, I can’t even get the minimum, then why do anything at all?’” he said.

“If you can’t bend, then it’s easy to break,” Dr. Richey said. By training yourself to view workout plans as adaptable, you can set yourself up to exercise more. Here’s how to make this mental shift.

Remember that something is better than nothing.

Maybe, in an ideal world, you would carve out extended windows of time to exercise in the exact way you’d like, several times a week. But life often intervenes, Dr. Segar said.

“I encourage an ‘all or something’ mind-set,” she said, in which any amount or intensity of physical activity is a win.

Even small doses of physical activity can benefit your health, and light intensity exercise such as walking or stretching can lower your risk of heart disease, manage blood sugar and improve mental health. Doing a single set of resistance exercises a few times a week can improve your muscle strength.

“If the goal is to be healthier and have greater well-being, it all counts,” said Darlene Marshall, a personal trainer in upstate New York who has also studied positive psychology. If you need an extra nudge to get going, she said, think about how you will feel after you’ve finished, say, dancing in your living room or doing a set of squats, versus doing nothing.

Have a backup plan.

When you plan your workouts, also plan for how you might adjust them if something unexpected gets in the way, said Dr. Edward Phillips, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.

“It’s contingency planning,” he said. This can be as simple as deciding in advance that if you aren’t able to run you will walk, or if you aren’t able to go to the gym you will do body-weight exercises at home. You might even tell yourself that if you can’t make it to a workout class on time, you will go anyway and “give yourself the grace to show up 10 minutes late,” he said.

Dr. Segar recommended coming up with a “menu” of workouts of different lengths and intensities that you can turn to if your original plans fall through.

Focus on the long game.

Finally, if you have a tendency to let a missed workout — or even a stretch of inactivity — wreck your routine, remind yourself that staying active consistently, over the course of many years, is what matters for long-term health and well-being, Dr. Richey said.

“Life will always get in the way,” he added. “So just know that that’s going to happen, and acknowledge it.” The key is to avoid saying, “I missed a few days, I missed a few weeks, I guess I won’t come back,” he said. “You’ve got to come back.”

When you do, especially if it’s been a while, set yourself up for success by setting small goals, he added, and celebrating when you achieve them. “You don’t have to do the 150 minutes,” he said. “Just do something that you didn’t do yesterday.”

Shifting your mind-set to focus on what you can do, versus what you can’t, can also motivate you to keep going, Ms. Marshall said.

Ultimately, Dr. Phillips added, any physical activity “is a gift you’re giving to yourself.”

The post This Mental Trick May Help You Get More Exercise appeared first on New York Times.

You can find Airbnbs in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, but it’s a lot tougher in New York City. The home-sharing conglomerate has largely been shut out after a string of losses in its fight with the union representing hotel workers, which sees Airbnb rentals as a threat to occupancy rates and its members’ jobs.

My colleagues Maya King and Sally Goldenberg write that Airbnb has renewed its campaign to loosen the city’s restrictions on short-term rentals and has sought the support of Black ministers in the hope that they will back Black homeowners who want to offer short-term rentals. I asked Maya to explain what’s at issue.

This sounds like a David-and-Goliath story, with Airbnb as Goliath, trying to open a new front in its fight to operate in New York City by reaching out to Black church leaders.

Airbnb has tried to make inroads with nearly every important stakeholder group in the city. The FIFA World Cup gives them an opening to draw attention to an event that’s going to bring tourists to the city and to an ongoing story that we’ve covered, of longtime middle-class Black New Yorkers who are being priced out of the city and having to leave.

This is one of the stories that is defining Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration and this moment in city politics. It’s also another test of his relationship with Black New Yorkers. And it’s about how much power large corporations have and how much impact they have on regular people.

You called it David vs. Goliath. I think that is an apt comparison.

The City Council bill that Airbnb is backing has only four sponsors and seems unlikely to pass — certainly not in time for the World Cup. What’s Airbnb’s strategy? It looks like they’re going to lose.

When I spoke to the policy chief at Airbnb, he recognized that the timing was not necessarily in their favor. But the World Cup offered an opportunity for them to draw attention to the way a big event with lots of tourists could increase revenue for people other than hotel owners.

That’s been Airbnb’s message for years.

A lot of opponents see a slippery slope here. If you allow a corporation as big and as powerful as Airbnb to get a foothold, it will push beyond short-term relief and raise the possibility of long-term changes in housing policy.

So the fear is about what’s beyond just the World Cup?

And in the minds of Black pastors and community leaders who are on both sides of the issue, it’s a question of what’s going to make homeownership and life more affordable for Black New Yorkers who are struggling right now.

The first way to build wealth in the city is to buy a home. That’s what a lot of Black New Yorkers did. Now, with property taxes possibly going up under Mayor Mamdani and the neighborhoods they live in changing and becoming less affordable, many are leaving. So neighborhoods that were once Black strongholds — Black political strongholds — no longer are.

Is Airbnb getting anywhere? Is Airbnb winning over Black ministers — and, by extension, their parishioners?

A few. I think for those who really believe that extra income could keep Black households afloat, it’s a salient point that Airbnb is making.

The most important thing Airbnb has to contend with is the power of the hotel workers’ union.

What has the hotel workers’ union done to counter the Airbnb lobbying? Is the union’s concern that the World Cup will be a bust?

I don’t think they think it’s going to be a bust, but they believe that politics is on their side. The union has a lot of allies. The mayor, the speaker of the City Council, even the governor — these are all people who have sided with the union.

The union feels it has the resources to stay the course even though it has less money and fewer big lobbyists. It still punches above its weight. It has about 40,000 members, which is relatively small as unions in New York go, but it represents a really important voting group.

What about Mamdani? He tangled with the hotel workers’ union during the campaign, and then he upset some Black homeowners over property taxes.

It’s true that during the primary the hotel union endorsed his main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and that Airbnb waged a digital campaign against Mamdani and two other candidates.

But I think it’s clear now, especially in the midst of the back-and-forth between the union and Airbnb, that the mayor is clearly on the side of the union. I think that’s in line with his overall approach to real estate interests and the enduring belief among opponents of Airbnb that allowing it to have a foothold in the city would create an opening for more real estate power, which would price out working New Yorkers.

Weather

Today will be mostly cloudy and breezy with temperatures near 71. Showers are likely tonight as temperatures settle near 55.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Thursday (Solemnity of the Ascension).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“What I am interested in is, quite literally, grounding you in what might be right below your feet that you might not be aware of.” — The artist Maya Lin, on her latest creation, the stone facade on the western walls of the 60-story JPMorgan Chase skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

The latest New York news

• Mamdani’s first executive budget: Three months after Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the city was facing a budgetary crisis, he announced that he had closed the gap, thanks to an infusion of state resources from Gov. Kathy Hochul and some routine belt-tightening.

• For N.Y.U. Langone, a subpoena from Texas: A grand jury subpoena from a federal prosecutor in North Texas seeks information about trans youth health care since 2020, setting up a potential showdown between the Justice Department and one of Manhattan’s leading medical institutions.

• A gift to expand child care: The Bezos Foundation, a nonprofit created by the parents of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, gave Robin Hood, the city’s largest and most influential charity focused on poverty, a $100 million gift earmarked for early childhood education.

• Teens indicted in deadly gang feud: 15 people, including 11 teenagers, were indicted after a series of gang-related shootings in Brooklyn left at least six people injured and one dead.

• Boy killed in Bronx fire: A 1-year-old boy died and his two siblings were critically injured after a fire tore through an apartment in the Bronx.

A text alert system for some private schools that went silent

Starting in 2024, the city’s emergency management agency operated a communications network that alerted private schools to nearby emergencies.

The messages stopped coming early this year. Parents like Sarah Feinberg and officials like Tom Palermo, a facilities director at a different private school from the one Feinberg’s daughter had attended, wondered why.

Last month, they got an answer: The emergency management agency said by email, “We needed to rededicate staff hours to preparing messaging in 14 different languages for a huge number of events,” including the World Cup.

City officials said that it was difficult to put a price tag on the program. But the email said that the notifications for private schools had taken 10 to 15 percent of the staff members’ time on Notify NYC, the citywide system that warns New Yorkers of dangerous conditions like hurricanes.

The alert system for private schools was never widely adopted. But it represented a potential solution to what advocates had regarded as a gap in the city’s emergency communications system. My colleague Matthew Haag writes that the emergency management agency indicated, after inquiries from The New York Times, that it was keeping the door open to resurrecting it.

METROPOLITAN diary

Wrapped up

Dear Diary:

Late one night after I moved to Manhattan from the rural South in 1989, I was riding the No. 6 train home from my job at Mortimer’s when I sat down across from what appeared to be a man completely wrapped in a sheet and lying across several seats.

He was wrapped so tightly that there seemed to be no way he could have done it himself.

I couldn’t discern any movement. Not a breath. Not a sound. Did he need help? Was he dead? Was this performance art? What should I do?

No one else seemed to be paying any attention, but my agitation must have been visible, because finally, an impeccably dressed older woman wearing white gloves and a hat with a lace veil leaned toward me.

“I don’t think he wants to be disturbed,” she said.

— Brian McMaster

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.

The post Will Airbnb Gain Ground in New York? appeared first on New York Times.

The tiny furry creatures weighed just 5.8 and 7.6 pounds. They required spoon-feedings four times a day. And they could not be allowed to recognize humans, as this would hinder their development of survival skills.

But now the 4-month-old brothers have reached a promising stage in their journey toward independence, successfully transitioning into an outdoor habitat and starting to feed independently at the San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center.

“Moving outside is a big step,” said Autumn Welch, wildlife operations manager at the Humane Society, in a statement Tuesday. “The cubs are gaining confidence, exploring and learning the skills they’ll need to survive on their own.”

The San Diego Humane Society is doing everything it can to mimic how the bears would grow up in the wild. Staff started out by wearing bear masks and animal furs, then crawling into the enclosure to spoon-feed the cubs formula. Now the cubs are feasting on solid foods and love fruits and leaves from native plants, and they’ll continue exploring the larger outdoor area as they grow more confident.

This news is welcome for the Angelenos who were devastated when the Department of Fish and Wildlife made the decision to kill Blondie, their mother, in March following two incidents where she swiped at local residents.

The swiftness with which Blondie was killed and the seeming lack of consideration for the fate of her offspring sparked outrage as, typically, cubs would remain close to their mother for the first 18 months of their life.

“The city was not a part of that conversation or decision [to euthanize],” Monrovia Mayor Becky Shevlin said in March. “We were absolutely devastated, especially when you think about her having the two little cubs.”

Fish and Wildlife, for its part, has stood behind its decision, stating that she had become too accustomed to people to be relocated into the forest and was likely to return, leading to more conflict with humans. Officials also said Blondie ran the risk of passing along patterns of depending on humans for food and shelter to her cubs.

But Blondie’s followers pointed out that this wasn’t her fault, noting that the onus is on residents to be responsible bear neighbors, sealing crawl spaces and trash cans to help prevent bears from developing a reliance on humans.

Her death inspired state Sen. Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas) to introduce Senate Bill 1135, which would mandate nonlethal solutions to human wildlife conflict. If passed, it would provide public education on mitigating negative encounters with wildlife, offer technical assistance to keep bears and wolves away from human habitat and maintain a statewide incident reporting system.

Monrovia resident Brian Gordon said Tuesday he was thankful to hear that Blondie’s two orphaned cubs are doing well and hopeful they can gain the important life lessons necessary for their release into the wild.

“Their lives have helped drive the momentum behind SB 1135, including public awareness of improvements needed within CDFW policies and transparency,” he said. “Blondie‘s legacy lives on through them, hopefully bringing the necessary changes that will help protect their future.”

The post Orphaned Monrovia bear cubs on path back to wild after state euthanized their mom appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Directed by Eugene Yi, the documentary (one part of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ larger series focusing on different minority groups) provides a straightforward lens on 15 figures from all walks of life — artists, activists, scientists — connected by their inclusion in a wide-net definition of the diaspora. Shorn of any larger narratives or showy touches, the film spotlights each subject telling, in brief, the individual histories and struggles of their lives.

That is often enough. The most interesting turns are not those of its most recognizable names — actors such as Sandra Oh and Kumail Nanjiani — but instead ones like a trans athlete or a New York City D.J., who renew and animate ideas that have, at times, been parroted into platitudes: that we are not a monolith, that the personal is political.

In their tellings, of American lives that can be at once deeply moving and totally common, they are a frequently poignant reminder not only of the nearness of the great pain and dislocation that dots the diaspora, but also of the resilience shared among those who have forged a place in the United States.

The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on HBO.

The post ‘The A List’ Review: The Diaspora, Described appeared first on New York Times.

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A Patagonia vest is to a finance bro as a cracked laptop is to an AI-agent power user.

The new calling card for AI coders is someone who won’t shut their laptop, even if it makes them look a bit silly.

From airports to high school hallways to ice rinks, people are leaving their laptops at least slightly open to keep their coding agents running. BI’s Henry Chandonnet spoke to these coders about their dedication to the AI agent game and the funny interactions they’ve had as a result.

Their approaches may differ — some keep the screen wide open while others just leave a finger in between — but the result is the same: if it’s cracked, they’re cooking.

That’s not to say their dedication doesn’t come with a bit of embarrassment.

“I think people think I’m whatever the equivalent of an iPad kid is for a middle-aged woman,” one AI user told Henry.

I can almost hear some of you screaming: You can set up your computer to keep running when the screen is closed!

We got plenty of comments on Henry’s story making that exact point. (Yes, you can comment on our stories. Yes, we actually read them.)

The “well, actually” crowd isn’t wrong. There are a number of ways to do this, from changing your computer’s settings to downloading a slew of third-party software. Henry breaks down all the methods here.

Some of the comments were genuinely highlighting this trick. Others, however, came off a bit more aggressive…

“Seriously?! It’s a simple setting, power options generally, to keep it running and not shut down when closed. Coders?! These aren’t engineers,” one commenter wrote.

But isn’t that the point? The AI revolution has largely been about empowering non-technical people to code. And now that they’re here, they might do things a bit differently.

Getting upset over that is like being a fan of an indie band that suddenly makes it big and criticizing the newcomers for not knowing the B-side tracks.

In the spirit of the band analogy, coding is having its Billboard moment. Vibe-coding tools have turned it mainstream, and there’s no going back.

Does that mean people might not follow old-school coding etiquette? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. (If you have some quirky behaviors around AI tools, or have noticed some, let us know.)

And who knows, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two from them.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post AI’s newest aesthetic has some people upset appeared first on Business Insider.

There was a skeleton under the heavy gray stones of the chapel floor.

Expectations were immediately high. Surely the bones belonged to Charles de Batz de Castelmore, also known as Count d’Artagnan, who served under King Louis XIV as captain of the Musketeers of the Guard, and was dramatized, fictionalized and immortalized in Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers.” In the story, he is the fourth musketeer and the main character, joining his friends Athos, Porthos and Aramis as a comrade in arms. The man’s swashbuckling fame lives to this day, making his grave a point of avid historical interest.

That’s why a group of community members set out to see if they could find d’Artagnan earlier this year. Jos Valke, the deacon of the church, and other locals formed a nonprofit group that started with metal detectors, located the old church foundation, and eventually looked underneath some loose floor stones.

By February, they unearthed a skull. In March, they announced that they had located what might be d’Artagnan’s skeleton, and that tests would be needed to confirm his identity.

“Now we’re waiting,” Mr. Valke said. “Anxiously waiting,” explaining that he expects results within the next few weeks.

The remains — a man’s bones, buried with a 17th-century coin and a musket ball — have been sent to a Dutch university for investigation. Carbon dating, DNA testing and other analyses are underway, Mr. Valke said. A hole remains in the church floor, covered by a plywood platform and a rug to allow Mass to proceed. And this place and Maastricht, the larger city it is part of, are holding their breath.

Already, the discovery has drawn a deluge of unaccustomed attention to the village, population 1,500. International media including the BBC, CNN and even Smithsonian Magazine have run articles. American and French tourists have stopped by the church to see the site, Mr. Valke said. The university where the bones are being analyzed had to take four weeks to build a secure room to do the analysis, he added, afraid that people were visiting the campus to try to see them, and that the skeleton might be stolen.

That university, the Saxion University of Applied Sciences, declined to confirm or deny that. It did confirm that it was involved in the investigation into the skeleton, but referred all other questions to the municipality.

Mr. Valke and his colleagues think that if the bones turn out to belong to d’Artagnan, this could be merely the start of a new chapter for Wolder, which sits on the outskirts of Maastricht and just on the Dutch side of the border between the Netherlands and Belgium.

A local tour operator is exploring the possibility of bus tours out to the church from downtown Maastricht. Bulent Ozdemir, who owns the Shell gas station at the end of the church’s small lane, wonders if bike routes might add their little village as a stop.

“It was a surprise,” Mr. Ozdemir said, standing behind his counter on a sunny May morning. “They’re very excited in Wolder.”

Broader Maastricht is also enthusiastic. Camille Oostwegel Sr., who owned several local luxury hotels before passing the business to his son, serves as squadron leader for the local branch of the modern-day Musketeers, an international organization that holds events and keeps alive musketeer lore. One of his hotels is in a nearby castle that served as a hospital during the 1673 siege of Maastricht in the Franco-Dutch war, in which d’Artagnan died. It serves a special d’Artagnan beer, which is made with Champagne yeast.

“He is a French hero — a very important hero of course,” said an effusive Mr. Oostwegel. The find is “the talk of the town.”

Quincy Van Burg works at Grand Cafe Nieuw Bruin, a spot for poffertjes — Dutch mini-pancakes — that opens to the sidewalk of Maastricht’s busiest tourist square. He said John Tana, a local recording artist, has put out a song to celebrate the discovery, called “Eine veur al,” or “one for all” in Dutch.

Maastricht is already flooded with tourists, so Mr. Van Burg and other service workers don’t expect it to be a game changer for business there.

But Wolder — perched on the hill above the city, and home to bright green fields, red brick buildings and tidy tile roofs — does not share in that bustle. The walking map sold at the Maastricht city shop sticks to the city’s core. Even a more extended foldout version cuts off Wolder’s streets, stopping just shy of d’Artagnanlaan (named, obviously, for our hero).

Already, the parish has long talked up its possible tie to the famous musketeer. At the entrance to the sanctuary, a statue of a proud-looking d’Artagnan in a royal blue sash and a jaunty hat stares bravely skyward from a display shelf in the corner, nestled just below a life-size, realistically painted crucifix. Maastricht — and specifically Wolder, for the purists — is often the final stop on the Route d’Artagnan, a hiking, riding and biking route that commemorates the musketeer’s life.

Yet it is not at all clear whether the results will be conclusive.

D’Artagnan has known descendants but the French nobility often had extramarital affairs, so it is at least possible that they are not biologically related to the musketeer, Mr. Valke points out. Given that, Mr. Valke argues that it will be hard to rule out his identity if the DNA does not match.

Still, municipal leaders say proving a DNA connection could be a step in the identification process.

“Verifying genealogical connections to d’Artagnan is an essential part of this process,” the local authorities said in an emailed statement.

Mr. Valke is hopeful, suggesting that the church and village might eventually plan a museum, and that people could come by the “thousands.” The church is not usually open during the day, he said. When he does open its doors at 3 p.m. these days, people drop by, but “not to pray.”

Still, he said he doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself. “We try to do this step by step,” he said.

Koba Ryckewaert contributed reporting.

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.

The post Are These the Bones of the Fourth Musketeer? This Dutch Village Hopes So. appeared first on New York Times.

Appearing on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins,” Comey was asked about his recent indictment by the Justice Department over his social media post that included a photograph of seashells, which Trump allies have interpreted as a threat on the president’s life. Comey said he expected an endless string of indictments until “Trump leaves office because he is obsessed with retribution.”

“I’m preparing for three and four [indictments], I mean, it’s not going to stop given who is president of the United States and the way he has really torn apart the Justice Department,” Comey told Collins. “I would expect there will be more efforts to get the president’s enemies because he’s obsessed with it, and that’s really, really sad.”

Collins asked Comey whether he believed Trump was “the same person as he was” nearly a decade ago. Citing Trump’s recent overnight social media posting spree where the president posted content 55 times over a three-hour period – including sharing posts that called former President Barack Obama a “demonic force” – Comey concluded that Trump was, in fact, “different” mentally than he was in 2017.

“He doesn’t seem okay to me. I know that sounds like a political shot – it seems like there’s something wrong with the man,” Comey said.

“There was always something wrong with the man in that he lacks a moral center, but this seems off, this middle-of-the-night Truth after Truth – not an actual truth, but a re-Truthing on his platform. Seems crazy to me. He seems different – not different in you redid your hair, I mean different in that you seem nuts, buddy.”

The post ‘He doesn’t seem OK’: James Comey says Trump mentally ‘different’ over new sign of decline appeared first on Raw Story.

Suddenly, she heard 10 loud sounds — like something banging on metal, she would later recount to the police. When the noises stopped, she opened the curtains and saw bullet holes in the trailer’s windshield.

Rihanna grabbed ASAP Rocky and pushed him to the ground.

“They shooting at us,” she told him, according to court documents.

That afternoon, March 8, the police arrested a woman, Ivanna Lisette Ortiz, who they say fired at least 20 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle into Rihanna’s house and a neighbor’s. The narrative of what the authorities say transpired that day unfolds in the Los Angeles Police Department’s investigative report of the episode.

Prosecutors later charged Ms. Ortiz, 35, with several counts, including attempted murder.

All three of Rihanna and ASAP Rocky’s children — ages 3, 2, and 5 months — were at home at the time of the shooting. Rihanna’s mother was also there, as were a nanny and a housekeeper. Two people were inside the neighboring home.

No injuries were reported.

A representative for Rihanna did not respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Ortiz, a speech therapist from Orlando, Fla., has a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday. The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office has been appointed to Ms. Ortiz’s case but has declined to comment on it.

In their report, the police say that Ms. Ortiz was wearing a blond wig when she was arrested. They say she invoked her Miranda rights at a police station but did make one comment to a pair of detectives.

“Can I say one sentence?” they said she asked them. “I would like to say that I wasn’t attempting murder. But that’s all I wanted to say.”

The police interviewed several witnesses to the shooting, including a chef for Rihanna who had been parked outside the home on what was her first day of work. At one point, a Tesla pulled up alongside the chef’s vehicle. The chef later told the police that the woman in it appeared to be smirking or smiling, “as if she was about to do something naughty.”

The chef thought the encounter was strange but went back to watching TikTok videos on her phone, according to the report. Then she heard a series of loud pops and looked up to see the Tesla driving away. Smoke from the gunshots was coming out of one of the car’s windows, she said.

When Rihanna was interviewed by the police, she said she had at times dealt with stalkers and death threats on social media but could not think of a recent event that might be associated with the shooting.

Rihanna told the authorities that after pushing ASAP Rocky to the ground, they both ran into the house and told everyone about the gunshots. The police identified bullet holes, the report says, in several places: the Airstream trailer, a pedestrian gate, a wooden fence and the exterior wall of a nursery.

Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting.

Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.

The post ‘They Shooting at Us’: Rihanna and ASAP Rocky Outlined Attack to Police appeared first on New York Times.

Henry doesn’t take any of it lightly.

“With this role, I have to rise to the occasion every night,” Henry said of Coalhouse, one of the Black Americans whose story in “Ragtime” is interwoven with those of affluent well-to-do white suburbanites and Jewish immigrants in pursuit of the American dream at the turn of the 20th century. Coalhouse sings about a lost love, his dreams for his newborn son, and then tragically, of inequities and justice denied. “I can’t come in at 90 percent and think I will live up to this material. It’s as heavy as a dream, this show, but it’s filled with so much promise.”

Henry, 41, has been on a wild ride with “Ragtime.” After spending two decades sharpening his leading man tools — and building a devoted fan base — in musicals like “The Scottsboro Boys,” “Carousel” and “Violet,” he appears to be closer than ever to winning his first Tony Award. Earlier this month he received his fourth Tony nomination, and many in the industry consider him to be the front-runner for best leading actor in a musical.

The buzz is louder this time around. “It’s hard to describe the feeling, but I know I’m doing what I dreamed I was going to do,” he said in an interview this week. “I’m sharing with audiences and they’re being touched. I can’t ask for a better moment.”

The production has been a recurring topic in theater circles since it opened last summer at Lincoln Center Theater. The entire cast has won praise, but Henry has been the standout. In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote that Henry’s “acting, like his singing, seems to emanate from his very core.” Jesse Green, a New York Times culture correspondent, named him one of 13 actors to see onstage no matter what.

While Henry appreciates the accolades, he is quick to dismiss personal glory. He casually referred to awards as “shiny things,” when we discussed the heightened attention in his dressing room in late April. What drives him, then, becomes a more interesting question, specifically with regard to this role. In addition to meticulous technique, the character of Coalhouse demands something that’s harder to prepare for: a willingness to absorb racial threats, grief and discrimination. What seeds were planted in Henry that yielded not only his disciplined approach to his craft but also his absence of fear? Nature, nurture or some hard-earned hybrid of both?

‘A Genuinely Divine Instrument’

“Ragtime,” the actor said, has been his greatest challenge, vocally and emotionally. He feels as if he can sing anything now. “I sing so much that my foundation is strong. I understand my gear shifts. You know what —” he hesitated before continuing. “Yeah, I’m going to say it: I feel like I have mastered the voice. But that’s not a stopping point. If you feel that you have gotten close to mastery, it’s because you have stayed a student.”

To power through the mammoth score for “Ragtime” — Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally’s 1998 adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel — while maintaining a resonant baritone, Henry has a tried-and-true routine: hydration (he drinks at least a gallon of water a day), sleep, a workout regimen, physical therapy, massages. He also believes in plasticity: “Every show is a different type of training,” he said. “You can’t put the same 10 exercises on it.”

When preparing for the role and songs like the call-to-justice anthem “Make Them Hear You,” he picked up his guitar, which has remained lodged in his hands since he was 11. “Whatever I am doing, I always work it out on guitar first,” he told me. Ragtime isn’t “the type of singing I started out singing, so I need to get it in my voice first. Then I can layer characteristics, details on top.”

The show’s director, Lear deBessonet, who also cast Henry in her 2022 Broadway revival of “Into the Woods,” used the word “Olympian” to describe his appetite for improvement. “With revivals, casting is everything,” she said. “You need the actor who can reveal the part. I felt Joshua was the person who could hold the very profound depth of Coalhouse’s grief, rage, joy, charisma, love. Emotionally, he could follow that arc, and his voice is just a genuinely divine instrument. He could give the music its full, radiant due.”

There was a hitch, though. A while back, Henry had told deBessonet that he wanted to focus on new works. Aside from a stint in “Waitress,” Henry’s last three Broadway credits had been revivals (“Into the Woods,” “Carousel” and “Shuffle Along”). He is also developing an original musical, “The Conversation,” with Julia Harriman and Nick Green.

But “Ragtime” carried deeper resonance for him. He has vivid memories of being a student at the University of Miami, listening to the original cast recording with Brian Stokes Mitchell, whom he lovingly refers to as “my friend, Stokes.” Mitchell originated the role of Coalhouse when the show debuted on Broadway in 1998, and it had become a dream role. “Ragtime” would be the exception.

Despite his success in the role and his many career highs, Henry has a tendency to point out the lows. In confessional-style videos posted on social media, Henry often reflects on failure, self-doubt and missed opportunities — like not being part of the original Broadway cast of “Hamilton” after years of workshopping the show alongside its creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Though he eventually starred as Aaron Burr when that musical opened productions in Chicago and Los Angeles.)

This is why he takes little for granted, and is constantly honing his craft. Miranda, who has tapped Henry for other projects — the musical “In the Heights,” the “Tick, Tick … Boom!” movie, the “Warriors” concept album he created with Eisa Davis — remains a friend and preacher of Henry’s industriousness. He insisted that my inquiry into what fuels Henry’s drive was actually needless. The answer is inscribed on the man’s genetic code: “immigrant parents, immigrant parents, immigrant parents,” Miranda laughed.

“That’s something we share,” Miranda, whose parents are from Puerto Rico, added. “I can’t remember a time when my parents didn’t have multiple jobs, and I get that same sense from Josh. His parents made miracles happen to get him to school. We’re not just going anywhere to get good at something, we’re going because people, because our families invested in us.”

A Window Into Coalhouse

Indeed, Henry’s parents immigrated to Canada from Jamaica, and the ease with which he glides into the accent during our conversations suggests a lifetime of mimicking his parents’ voices, in addition to their diligence. Also carried over from the Greater Antilles was a deep faith: The church was his first playground for working out his singing talent, the first place he learned about the transcendence that a voice, trained or not, could elicit. Psalms and Bible verses still roll melodically off his tongue.

That spiritual connection was an early window into Coalhouse. The character, Henry reminded me, is a believer. In a line of dialogue, he says: “The Good Lord looked down and saw me lonely and loveless and He thought to Himself: ‘Enough is enough. I’m putting Sarah in Coalhouse’s life.’”

“Those words are not of Coalhouse’s own strength,” Henry explained. “Something larger saw fit to bless him. And if so much of him rests on this line of faith, when does Coalhouse lose it? When is it challenged?”

Faith also helped Henry to bond with his co-star Nichelle Lewis, who plays Sarah, Coalhouse’s lost love. “Our backgrounds are similar in the way that they are grounded by faith and energized by a sense of ‘This is my purpose. This is what I am called to do.’”

Before they met in rehearsals for a New York City Center gala production in late 2024 that preceded the Broadway run, Lewis did not know who Henry was, but said she realized later that he’d been singing to her for years: Henry’s 2021 album, “Grow,” was in her morning playlist. (The album was a return to some of Henry’s earliest inspirations outside the church. “Stevie Wonder is up there,” he told me. “And Peabo Bryson. Honestly, if you don’t know Peabo, you don’t know me.”)

When “Ragtime” closes this summer, other projects will take its place, but it will also allow him to spend more time with his wife, Cathryn — his college sweetheart whom he repeatedly championed during our conversations — and their three young sons. Henry said the boys are just getting to the age when they understand what he does for a living, and why he’s not home at night.

Domestic sacrifice comes with a life in theater. For Henry, tapping into that pain intensifies his work, particularly in songs like “Wheels of a Dream,” a ballad of hope that Coalhouse and Sarah sing about their son:

With the promise of happiness

and the freedom he’ll live to know

he’ll travel with head held high

just as far as his heart can go

and he will ride

our son will ride

on the wheels of a dream.

But Coalhouse and Sarah’s road to happiness is marred by the racism of low-level thugs and high-ranking officials. Eight times a week, Coalhouse is robbed, threatened and called a racial slur — violence that can stick to an actor’s body long after the curtain call.

“In real life, the times I’ve been called the N-word, hard R, I was stunned,” Henry said. “Coming from a Jamaican background, we think of ourselves as kings and queens, so my reaction is like Coalhouse’s: ‘Oohh, there’s a misunderstanding here. You don’t know me. I am not going to get the courtesy I deserve.’”

Both Coalhouse and Henry know the power of self-possession, especially when it has been hard won. Conviction like that may take a lifetime to build, and Henry still has a lot of life ahead of him to deepen it. When he stops to take stock of how far he has come, though, he knows his 11-year-old self would be in awe.

“I used to tell my brother that all we needed was a bathroom, a fridge, and a room with instruments all around so we could make music all day. I am living that dream,” Henry said. “‘Ragtime’ is awesome and it’s giving me a spotlight, and I come back in between scenes to pick up the guitar because I’m always doing things to get my creativity out. I made promises to my younger self that if I ever saw a moment like this, I’d stay hungry.”

The post The Singer Bringing Broadway to Its Feet Every Night appeared first on New York Times.

In February, the California State Assembly passed, by a 54–14 vote, a measure seeking to place on the November ballot a change in the state constitution to allow racial preferences in K–12 education and in higher-education scholarships. (The state Senate has not yet acted on the measure.) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a 375-page Racial Equity Plan last month that said, “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation and racial oppression”; among other measures, the plan reaffirms the city’s intent to steer contracts to minority-owned businesses. Late last year, Democratic supermajorities in the Maryland House and Senate overrode Governor Wes Moore’s veto of legislation to study reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

In huge swaths of the country, the Democratic brand has become anathema. The party will struggle to recapture the White House and reclaim the Senate unless it can persuade some red-state voters to take a fresh look at it. One obvious move would be for the Democrats, who have hemorrhaged working-class voters, to abandon their stubborn support for politically radioactive racial preferences. Significantly more Americans believe that economically disadvantaged people of any race deserve special consideration in admissions and employment decisions, and such efforts do not run afoul of laws against racial discrimination. Nevertheless, many Democrats cannot bring themselves to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling—or the public’s attitude—even when doing so would help their prospects immensely.

In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas—including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza—in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates. They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.

The findings are surprising. Affirmative action has rarely turned up in the top-10 issues most relevant to voters. Inflation, the economy, jobs, and health care almost always rank higher.

Perhaps affirmative action has a powerful symbolic value to some voters. To proponents, it signals a commitment to the advancement of underrepresented groups, particularly Black Americans. To other voters, Democrats’ support of racial preferences suggests that the party favors some groups over others rather than seeking equal treatment for all Americans.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Trump is right about affirmative action]

As the center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has argued, swing-district Democrats rarely play up the party’s most unpopular positions; many candidates merely try to avoid mentioning them at all. But Republicans are only too happy to bring up these issues. This is why President Trump emphasizes his opposition to “discriminatory DEI” programs at every turn. Republicans may disagree about the Iran war and entitlement cuts, but they are united in opposition to DEI programs. And they know that many Democrats are also opposed to counting race in deciding who gets ahead. In 2020, for example, California voters supported Joe Biden over Trump by a whopping 29 points and simultaneously rejected an effort to reinstate racial preferences by 14 points.

Even among the intended beneficiaries of racial preferences in college admissions, ambivalence has grown. A Galluppoll taken months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard found that 52 percent of Black respondents, and 62 percent of Black respondents under 40, said that striking down racial preferences was “mostly a good thing.” (I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in that case and in a similar lawsuit against the University of North Carolina.)

The most successful Democrats have long understood that support for racial preferences is a political albatross. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the only Democratic presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected, both publicly questioned racial preferences. In 1995, Clinton said that he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative-action programs to economic need, “because they work better and have a bigger impact and generate broader support.” More than a decade later, then–presidential candidate Obama said that he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did.

Neither president, however, fully followed through on his instincts. An Obama staffer once told me that the only way the president could shift policies toward class-based affirmative action would be if the courts forced him to. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down racial preferences was a defeat for Democratic priorities but also a political gift.

New evidence suggests that, after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, universities began the transition from racial to economic affirmative action. In a recent Progressive Policy Institute study, my colleague Aidan Shannon and I found that since the Supreme Court’s decision, the share of students eligible for federal Pell Grants (which go to low-income and working-class students) increased at 83 percent of top colleges for which data were available. Our findings are in accord with a 2025 Associated Press analysis of 17 highly selective colleges, which found that “almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year.” In many cases, the increases are huge. In 10 of the 18 top colleges we studied, the share of Pell Grants rose by more than 20 percent, and at six of those, the share increased by more than 30 percent. In the Associated Press analysis, MIT expanded its Pell representation by 35 percent, Duke by 29 percent, and Smith College by 25 percent.

The Trump administration has suggested that it may attack these new economic programs as proxy discrimination. Democrats ought to be defending these new initiatives instead of clinging to racial preferences.

[Rose Horowitch: So much for class-based affirmative action]

Parties can shift. Ask the Republican establishment, which watched in 2016 as a renegade presidential candidate remade the party on issues including trade, entitlement reform, and the Iraq War. Democrats should understand that the most successful reforms—such as Social Security, Medicare, and Obama’s crowning achievement, the Affordable Care Act—distributed benefits based on economic need, not race.

Any Democratic presidential candidate who wants to jettison racial preferences in favor of economic affirmative action has a political opportunity. Among the party’s potential candidates in 2028 is Moore, the governor who bucked overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Maryland legislature. His position has a powerful precedent. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that there exists a better path forward on reparations: a Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged of all races.

The evidence suggests that a shift away from overt racial preferences, more than any other position change, will prompt skeptical swing voters to take note.

The post The Democrats Can’t Let Go of Racial Preferences appeared first on The Atlantic.

But for the next week or so, that space will be lined with millions of law enforcement documents related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex offender, a case that has both fascinated and repulsed many Americans.

Since opening on Friday, the exhibition has attracted a steady stream of visitors to 101 Reade Street, just blocks from where Epstein was found dead inside his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial. The files, printed and bound, take up 3,437 volumes, each about two inches thick; all told, they weigh more than eight tons, according to David Garrett, one of the exhibition’s backers.

While the project’s name — the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room — is purposefully provocative, Garrett said that one of its primary goals was to break through the online static of looking at the some 3.5 million documents, photographs and videos released by the Department of Justice in late January.

“When I’m looking at my phone and I see a cat video and an ICE raid and my aunt’s birthday cake and evidence of the worst crime in 250 years of American history, and it’s all kind of in the same feed, it all sort of takes the same weight,” he said in an interview last week, adding, “You lose context.”

In December, Garrett — a Michigan-based entrepreneur who has worked in the luxury wine industry — helped form a nonprofit, the Institute for Primary Facts, which he says aims to fight the Trump administration and is producing a series of pop-up art projects under the banner of “the Trumpsonian.”

As such, the exhibition on Reade Street has joined a collection of other satirical works aimed at calling attention to the president’s association with Epstein, including sculptures placed on the National Mall depicting the two men holding hands and in an iconic pose from the film “Titanic.”

The name of the president appears thousands of times in the files released by the Justice Department; he has denied any wrongdoing. Epstein, a wealthy financier with deep ties to the rich and powerful, was alleged to have sexually abused and trafficked hundreds of young women and girls.

An investigation by The New York Times late last year concluded that Trump and Epstein once had a close friendship, often bonding over a pursuit of women. The president told New York magazine in 2002 that Epstein was a “terrific guy,” but later said he ended the friendship in the mid-2000s after Epstein “hired away” spa attendants from his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Authorship of the statues in Washington has been claimed by an anonymous group of artists called the Secret Handshake. The Primary Facts group is more public-facing, and it’s privately funded. The Reade Street project cost in “the low six figures,” according to Garrett.

Admission is free but limited: The group has only allowed a few dozen visitors every hour, booked through online reservations, and there are security officers inside and out. Demand has been brisk, with more than 90 percent of the nearly 5,000 available slots claimed by Tuesday, Garrett said.

The bound volumes fill long bookshelves fronted by velvet ropes: Visitors are not allowed to browse through the collection, a decision Garrett said was made out of respect for possible unredacted mentions of victims. The center of the main room, where hundreds of small artificial candles flicker, is devoted to survivors.

Perhaps the rawest section of the exhibition is downstairs, where sparse decoration suggests a traditional library. There, a bulletin board invites visitors to offer up opinions, many of which are frustrated and angry.

“We all need to be more outraged,” one reads. “Where is the justice?” reads another. “Keep prosecuting,” a third reads.

Some are simply bewildered. “How?” one comment reads.

Johnna Zabel, 35, an English as a second language teacher from Brooklyn, visited on Saturday after learning about the exhibition on Instagram. “I just thought it would be very impactful to be able to physically be in a room with that many of the files, just to show how many there really were,” she said.

“It’s overwhelming because they had this evidence for so many years,” she added. “And they didn’t do anything with it.”

Tamara Peterson, 55, echoed that sentiment. “So many people spoke up,” said Peterson, an executive assistant from Brooklyn. “And nobody paid attention to these women.”

The one exception to the no-browsing rule for the volumes is for the victims themselves, including women like Danielle Bensky, who attended a preview of the exhibition last week with Katie Phang, a liberal lawyer and political commentator. Phang posted video of the experience on YouTube.

Bensky, who was 17 and an aspiring dancer when she says Epstein abused her, said she had initially worried that the exhibition would be traumatizing. Instead, she was moved.

“I had expected walking in there and seeing, you know, all sorts of images or all of our stuff plastered everywhere,” Bensky said. “And it was just so not that.”

She added that she was impressed “at the care that they took to ensure that survivors are protected, and honor us,” noting that the message of the exhibition seemed to be “how much is here and needs to be investigated.”

“It kind of knocks the wind out of you,” she said.

Journalists, members of Congress and members of law enforcement have also been invited to leaf though the files, via private appointment, the group says on its website. Beyond Bensky, several other survivors have seen the exhibition, and others are scheduled to do so; a handful of law enforcement officials have asked for appointments, as well.

Garrett said he and his collaborators had spent “too much time yelling at the TV and listening to podcasts and thinking, like, What can we do?” before hitting on the idea of the “reading room.” The group hopes to mount it in other cities, including Washington.

Sitting a few feet from the candles representing Epstein’s victims, Garrett said his personal goal for the project was rooted in being a father to two daughters, ages 15 and 26.

“The reason that there are that many victims is because there was no accountability after the first one and the second one and the hundredth and the 300th and 500th,” he said. “And if there’s no accountability, how do we know it’s not going to happen again?”

Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.

The post Want to See the Epstein Files in Print? Here Are the 3,437 Volumes. appeared first on New York Times.

Just like his artwork, Twombly’s life confounded convention. In 1957, a few years after the breakup of his romantic relationship with Robert Rauschenberg in New York, Twombly went to Italy. In Rome he met Luisa Tatiana Franchetti, known as Tatia, who was the sister of Giorgio Franchetti, a collector of his art. Cy and Tatia married in 1959, and their only child, Alessandro, was born at the end of the year.

The couple eventually separated, although they remained very close and never divorced. Cy in the mid-1980s moved south of Rome to Gaeta, near his companion and assistant, Nicola Del Roscio, and Tatia later lived primarily in Ronciglione, in the countryside northwest of Rome. Tatia died in 2010, Cy in 2011. In 2022, their granddaughter, Maia Twombly, discovered cardboard boxes in the attic of the Ronciglione house that contained thousands of photo negatives that Tatia had made, primarily in the ’50s and ’60s.

She was delighted to find that they showed Cy relaxing before the camera. (“Rauschenberg was the only other person who ever photographed him that way,” she said.) Even better, along with privileged access, the pictures displayed Tatia’s artistic acumen. After printing them and making a selection, Maia has just published a book, “Stella Honey,” which was Cy’s term of endearment for his wife. A gallery show of the photographs will open June 3 at the Spazio Treccani Arte in Rome.

“It’s interesting that no one really talked about her taking pictures,” Maia said. “She was not a person who liked being the center of attention. I think even in the photographs there is a sense of distance between her and her subjects.”

Going through the images, she said, she has come to a new appreciation of Tatia: “I remember her now not as an 80-year-old woman, but as a 30-year-old. It’s like she is no longer my grandmother but my friend.”

The post Cy Twombly, From Intimate Angles appeared first on New York Times.

The Trump boys made a lot of promises at launch. For $499 and $47.45 a month (get it?), it would supply a shimmering gold-plated (naturally) smartphone with a 6.78-inch screen for subscribers who would receive unlimited talk, text and data, 24/7 roadside assistance through Drive America, telehealth services, free international calling, and no contracts or credit check — cancel anytime! And fully MADE IN THE USA!

They might have also added, “no actual phone,” as everyone who forked over the required $100 deposit is still phoneless some 11 months later.

It wasn’t until later that the small print noted the deposit was non-refundable. Whoops. And that the rebranded Android phone was in fact mostly manufactured in China with final assembly in Florida, using components made abroad. This forced a marketing change to an “American-proud” design and a “with American values in mind” description. Why they even bothered when the phone itself may never actually materialize is unclear.

Meanwhile, a reported 600,000 people who dutifully sent in their hundred bucks are out of luck. For their money down, they received a valuable lesson in terms and conditions.

There may, in fact, never be a Trump Mobile device. It’s entirely possible there was never any intention to make one at all, potentially just another smoke-and-mirrors scam from the people who brought you Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Magazine, Trump Water, Trump Watches, Trump: The Game, the Tour de Trump Bicycle Race, Trump Sneakers, the Trump Bible, and on and on.

There is no end to the ways that the Trump Crime Family will swindle the gullible out of their hard-earned greenbacks. You may think I’m kidding when I say the disclaimer now maintains, “A deposit does not constitute a purchase, create a sales contract, reserve inventory, or guarantee the device will be produced or delivered.” They might as well just say, “It’s the first smartphone with a campaign slogan instead of an actual release date!”

You talk about a sucker being born every minute. In the Trump era, it’s every second. But the fact that there are still souls who trust these cheats doesn’t mean they aren’t due the product they paid for.

The customers who have been on the waitlist were initially told the phone was coming out last August. But it’s faced multiple delays, with revised shipping estimates moving to October 2025, December 2025, January 2026 and March 2026. Now we’re in May, and there is no hint of when, or if, the phones will surface — and certainly no discussion of refunds. Perish the thought.

In fact, Trump and Sons have pocketed $59 million in literal chump change from the preorder deposits so far. That’s money the president can use to bet on the stock market, or invest in crypto, or take a bath in.

So for the moment, all that people sitting at home with no Trump Mobile T1 to satisfy their communication needs have are jokes to keep them entertained, like:

• The battery life is incredible because no one’s been able to turn one on.

• It runs on Android, IOS, and perpetual disappointment.

• The launch has been delayed so many times that even the voicemail says, “We’ll circle back.”

• It’s the first phone whose most active feature is the preorder button.

• At this point, the Trump phone and the GOP healthcare plan should launch together.

But seriously, if you go to the phone website (trumpmobile.com), the scamming grows even more specific. Here’s one gem: “Trump Mobile does not control and is not responsible for the availability, performance, content, or quality of Included Services. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Trump Mobile disclaims all liability arising from or related to your use of any Included Services.”

Translation: We’re barely putting our name on this thing. Call China if you’ve got a problem, pal.

It’s pretty much what we would expect to see from a brand that cares significantly more about promotion than quality. They slap the Trump name on things to generate cash without any concern for the unfortunate saps who buy the product or service, as those who enrolled at Trump U discovered the hard way.

That’s the thing with all things Trump. No one has ever emerged from purchasing anything his poisonous handle has been associated with and thought, “Wow, that was SO worth it.” More often, it’s, “What the living hell was I thinking?”

I’ll be surprised if the Trump phone ever actually surfaces. I’ll be even more shocked if anyone is ever reacquainted with their deposit. Trump is not in the habit of reimbursing or holding up his end of any deal. It’s part of his charm.

The confounding part is the folks who continue to trust him despite getting screwed time after time. It is, as they say, the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As if we needed additional evidence that anyone who backs Trump is full-scale nuts.

Here’s another thing to consider: Do we really think that a Trump-branded phone would be released without it being packed with digital surveillance technology that scoops up information on the owner? I mean, how creepy would it be to walk around with a communications device bearing the Trump name constantly in your pocket, or purse, or in your hand?

As if the man wasn’t controlling our lives far too much as it is. I’ve already grown to despise the color gold or anything golden in my eyeline, up to and including the McDonald’s golden arches.

I am, however, pretty sure that the phone – if and when it actually comes into being – will come with one-button calling to Hell.

Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

The post These blindly plodding Trump disciples are the definition of insane appeared first on Raw Story.

Included in the communication was a return phone number and a plea to call “immediately.”

By evening’s end, a frazzled Ventura senior citizen — during a cloak-and-dagger assignation — had uttered a secret code to a person who claimed to be law enforcement, then handed him $25,000.

It was the culmination of a well-executed scam — so successful that the San Gabriel Valley pair behind the scheme decided to try it again, authorities said.

They contacted the same Ventura senior, and this time, they asked for double, authorities said.

But the victim, realizing he’d been duped, had reached out to police. And the scammers contacted him right when he was in the middle of an interview with detectives, authorities said.

In the end, Shaohua Sun, 39, of Monterey Park and Yanwen Gu, 40, of Rosemead were arrested by Ventura police detectives and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit elder abuse. The charge carried special allegations of the victim being particularly vulnerable and crimes indicating planning, sophistication and professionalism.

Sun pleaded guilty Thursday and paid back $25,000; Gu pleaded guilty Monday. The Chinese natives are currently incarcerated at the Ventura County Main Jail and the Todd Road Jail, respectively, and face up to four years’ imprisonment followed by two years of probation.

Gu will be sentenced in Ventura County Superior Court on June 9, and Sun follows on June 12.

“Thanks to the outstanding investigative work and quick coordination by the Ventura Police Department’s Street Crimes Unit, these defendants were stopped before they could further exploit a vulnerable senior citizen,” Ventura County Dist. Atty. Erik Nasarenko said in a statement on Tuesday.

An after-hours call to attorneys for both Sun and Gu was not returned.

The victim, who requested not to be identified, initially received a text message on March 18 asking him to confirm a $350 Apple Store purchase made with his credit card.

The message also asked the man to speak with a scammer, who falsely told him that his Ventura County Credit Union account was linked to child sexual abuse content based in Canada.

He was then directed to another scammer via a phone call, with this person claiming to be a member of the Ventura County Credit Union Fraud Department.

This conspirator, known in court documents as “Jade,” told the victim to withdraw $25,000 and meet with an undercover Ventura police officer. The funds were to be surrendered as evidence.

The caller even provided a “code phrase” that the victim was supposed to say to the alleged undercover officer at their meeting.

That same day, the victim did as instructed, and delivered $25,000 to one of the scammers, according to court documents.

It wasn’t until the next day that the victim and his spouse began to believe they had been defrauded and reached out to Ventura police.

Detectives from the Street Crimes Unit met with the victim on March 19. They were in the process of interviewing him when Jade reached out to the older man, according to authorities.

This time, Jade requested $50,000, according to authorities.

Ventura police believed Jade and her team were part of a larger international fraud network and coordinated the meet-up.

On March 19, Gu tried to collect $50,000 from the victim, according to authorities. That’s when Ventura police arrested Gu as she tried to run away. Sun, whom officers believe was a lookout, was also arrested.

“The victim’s decision to give us a call and work with our detectives was critical in helping us stop this scam before additional money was lost,” Ventura Police Chief David Dickey said in a statement.

Dickey classified the scam as “highly sophisticated” and targeted at older adults.

“We encourage all community members to have conversations with their loved ones about these tactics and to report suspicious circumstances or activity immediately,” Dickey said.

The post Scam of elderly man goes so well, con artists strike again. But their timing is horrible appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Persona 4 Revival Release Date Reportedly Set for February 2027

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been almost a year since Persona 4 Revival was announced in 2025. However, up to this point, there hasn’t been many updates about the P4R remake. We haven’t even gotten a proper trailer for it. However, a popular Atlus leaker recently claimed to have revealed the game’s release date.

According to an insider, the Persona 4 Revival release date will be February 2027. This latest leak was posted on the ResetEra gaming forum by lolilolailo. The user is a popular SEGA / Atlus leaker who has revealed accurate leaks in the past for games such as Yakuza and Raidou Remastered.

The Persona 4 Revival release date was seemingly confirmed when lolilolailo replied to another user and said it would have a “similar release month” as Persona 3 Reload. Well, Reload launched on February 2, 2024. So assuming his cryptic comment wasn’t being facetious, it seems that Atlus plans to release the Persona 4 Remake early next year.

This is also interesting, because back in April, a famous FUNKO Pop leaker claimed that a new line of Persona 4 Revival Figurines is scheduled to be released in February 2027. As we previously reported, the insider claimed that the Persona 4 Remake would launch early next year. This directly lines up with the lolilolailo leak.

Persona 4 Revival Might Reuse Persona 3 Reload’s Structure and Systems

The other noteworthy news to come out of this leak is the confirmation that Persona 4 Revival will likely have similar features and structure as Persona 3 Reload. This might not be too surprising to users, as Atlus is usually pretty consistent with their remake releases.

And with Persona 3 Reload already laying the groundwork for a modern engine, it makes sense that the Persona 4 Remake would also adapt it. Although it should be pointed out that lolilolailo didn’t technically confirm this. However, he did reply to a comment saying P4R Revival is extremely similar to Persona 3 Reload in structure.

Persona 4 Revival Could Be Revealed at Xbox Games Showcase 2026

Assuming that Atlus is following the same launch pattern as Persona 3 Reload, it’s likely that Persona 4 Revival will get fully revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday, June 7, 2026. When Persona 3 Reload was first revealed in June 2023, it was also at the Summer Game Fest event.

Here is how Atlus might release Persona 4 Revival based on their previous remake project:

• Persona 3 Reload
  • Revealed: At Xbox Games Showcase June 2023
  • Released: February, 02, 2024
• Persona 4 Revival
  • Revealed: At Xbox Games Showcase June 2026???
  • Released: February, 02, 2027???

While lolilolailo has been accurate in the past, I would still take this latest leak with a grain of salt. It’s true that Revival has so far been following the exact launch patterns as Reload. With the Xbox Games Showcase just a month away, we won’t have to wait long to see if this latest rumor is true or not.

The post Persona 4 Revival Release Date Reportedly Leaked By Insider appeared first on VICE.

• BYD sees an upside to gas-powered cars becoming more expensive to run.
• BYD exec Stella Li said that the rising cost of gas is driving interest in the Tesla rival’s EVs.
• The Chinese EV giant is betting on a major global expansion to reverse sinking sales and profits.

Tesla’s biggest rival sees an upside in the oil price shock: more EV buyers.

Stella Li, the executive vice-president of Chinese EV giant BYD, said on Wednesday that the rapid rise in global oil prices following the war in the Middle East was a “wake-up call” for car buyers who had been reluctant to go electric.

“People suddenly realize that electric and hybrid cars are saving them money. With the oil price increasing, it’s hurting their daily life,” the BYD executive told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit.

“This helps us, also. It’s making a lot of people who never wanted to try out an electric car start to come to our shops,” added Li, who is second-in-command to BYD CEO Wang Chuanfu and the public face of the Chinese company.

Crude oil prices soared above the $100 a barrel mark after the US and Israel attacked Iran in March, and have remained volatile since then.

The oil shock has driven up fuel prices worldwide, with US gas prices hitting a four-year high of $4.22 in recent weeks. Some nations have introduced four-day workweeks and urged their citizens to avoid unnecessary car journeys to conserve fuel.

The rising cost of filling up at the pump comes at an opportune time for BYD, which is betting on overseas sales as it faces pressure back home.

The automaker announced last month that first-quarter profits had fallen by more than 50% amid fierce competition from rival EV makers in China.

Li said on Wednesday that BYD’s ambition was to become a “global manufacturer” this year, with the company looking to build an additional two factories in Europe, in addition to its plant in Hungary.

BYD is also planning to roll out its first EV designed exclusively for the European market in the coming months, a hybrid hatchback called the Dolphin G, and is set to roll out its five-minute EV charging stations across the continent.

BYD is unlikely to bring its low-cost electric vehicles to the US anytime soon, however, due to high tariffs on Chinese EVs.

Despite global gas prices remaining high, EV sales have yet to see a significant uplift.

Global sales of electric vehicles grew 6% year over year in April, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, with surging sales in Europe offset by falling demand in North America and China.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post BYD exec says oil price surge is a ‘wake-up call’ that is pushing people to buy EVs appeared first on Business Insider.

In a ceremony filled with tradition and ritual, lawmakers gathered in the House of Lords to hear the king describe the priorities of Mr. Starmer’s government for the year ahead. The speech said an “increasingly dangerous and volatile” world would test “every element” of Britain.

“My government will respond to this world with strength and aim to create a country that is fair for all,” Charles said, reading words drafted by Mr. Starmer’s aides and advisers. “My ministers will take decisions that protect the energy, defense, and economic security of the United Kingdom.”

In a typical year, the king’s speech is an opportunity for the sitting prime minister and his cabinet to create political momentum behind their legislative proposals, giving a long list of planned agenda items.

But this year, the speech has been overshadowed by turmoil inside Mr. Starmer’s party. It took place just a day after close to 100 Labour lawmakers called for the prime minister’s resignation and a half-dozen ministers quit their posts in protest of his refusal to step down.

Hours before heading to Parliament to attend the speech, Mr. Starmer met briefly at No. 10 Downing Street with Wes Streeting, the country’s health secretary and the person believed most likely to try and challenge him for leadership of the governing Labour Party and the job of prime minister.

The health secretary spent just 20 minutes inside the building and neither Mr. Starmer nor Mr. Streeting issued a statement afterward. For months, Mr. Streeting has made no secret of his desire to challenge the prime minister when the time is right. But to kick off that process, he would have to collect support from 81 Labour members of Parliament. So far he has not done so.

David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, told reporters on Tuesday that “no one seems to have the names to stand up against Keir Starmer,” and said to his Labour colleagues: “Lets get on with the business of running this country.”

Despite the political drama swirling through Westminster, that business began on Wednesday, with the usual pageantry inside the halls of Parliament.

As is tradition, the cellars of the parliament buildings were first searched by the king’s guards — a remembrance of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when Guy Fawkes and Catholic collaborators tried and failed to blow up King James I as a blow against Britain’s Protestant established churches.

The king presided over the session wearing the Robe of State, an 18-foot red velvet cape, and the Imperial State Crown, which features 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and 269 pearls. Lawmakers were summoned to the chamber by the House of Lords official known as the Usher of the Black Rod, who banged on the door of the House of Commons with a literal black rod.

In his speech, the king made reference to 37 specific bills that Mr. Starmer’s government intends to try and push through Parliament in the next 18 months. Most of them were pieces of legislation that the prime minister’s team had already been working to introduce.

“My ministers will continue to invest in apprenticeships,” Charles said, referring to an effort to provide more opportunities to young people. “My ministers will push forward with significant reforms to the police, the National Health Service and to the criminal justice system,” he said, referring to three legislative proposals that Mr. Starmer made months ago.

The speech could deepen the anger among disaffected Labour Party lawmakers whose frustration with Mr. Starmer is rooted in part in a belief that his agenda is not aggressive enough and is not connecting with British voters.

That was demonstrated vividly last week, when voters resoundingly rejected Labour candidates in municipal elections across England and in contests for the devolved legislatures in Wales and Scotland. Many local Labour candidates said voters blamed Mr. Starmer for their decision to back another party.

In the last several days, Mr. Starmer has said that he will pursue his agenda with more urgency in the wake of the elections.

“For the British people, tired of a status quo that has failed them, change cannot come quickly enough,” Mr. Starmer said in remarks on Monday morning. It may be days, or even longer, before it is clear whether Mr. Starmer will have a chance to make that happen.

Michael D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent for The New York Times, covering British politics and culture and diplomacy around the world.

The post King’s Speech Comes at an Awkward Time for Starmer appeared first on New York Times.

Which brings me to the admission. No one with any confidence in their face willingly adheres appliques that calcify into what can only be described as a layer of concrete. I perform this routine for a simple reason: I’m visibly aging, and I’m not happy about it. As a woman in her 30s, with years of continued living to look forward to, I don’t want to socially vanish, which is what usually happens to many women of a certain age. I don’t want to become invisible once my face droops a little or when the wrinkles won’t abate with stickers. I want to look not like a puerile being, but some mysterious, age-ambiguous alien. (I do recognize this is a concern for the fortunate, but don’t fret: I also worry about whether I will be able to pay my bills each month. I contain multitudes.)

Why I reported this

I’m a product of the early 2000s when magazines and entertainment glorified beauty, youth, and thinness to the highest degree. The trend cycle has worked its way back around and these ideals are in fashion again, only now with the added pressures of social media and the accessibility of cosmetic procedures. At a moment of transition in my life, I wondered whether I should ignore the constant pressure to look perfect — and what it meant for my identity if I did.

The desire to not age is laughable, I’m well aware. We’re all hurtling toward the same inevitable fate. But some people’s journeys to the pearly gates are more poreless than others. Cosmetic procedures like Botox, fillers, and facelifts aren’t new, but their startling ubiquity is. Between 2019 and 2022, the prevalence of Botox and similar neuromodulators increased by 73 percent, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Fillers were second to Botox in terms of the most popular “minimally invasive” procedures in 2024. Since 2017, surgeons have reported a 60 percent increase in facelifts and younger patients are increasingly seeking them out. And although more men are seeking cosmetic procedures, the population who most frequently undergoes these treatments is overwhelmingly female. All told, between 2020 and 2023, aesthetic procedures increased 40 percent globally, according to one study.

People aren’t just modifying their faces, but shrinking their bodies, too. Nearly one in eight American adults said they were taking a GLP-1, according to a 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll. The term “Ozempic” has become shorthand for the class of drugs that celebrities and everyday people alike utilize for weight loss, helping to reinvigorate the briefly dormant ideal that to be beautiful and desired, you must be small.

In other words, we now, as a society, have more control over our bodies and appearances than at any point in history. We’re both sculptor and marble, chiseling our images into a version that most aligns with who we are — or who we think we are. But our lives, and our bodies, are constantly changing. We age, we get pregnant, we break bones, we get sick, we grieve, throwing off the balance between how we see ourselves and how the world perceives us. There exists a fear of not recognizing ourselves as we move through these transitions. When bodies and appearances are malleable, what does that mean for the person underneath?

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am completely average-looking. Never one to have been praised for my beauty or to have profited from pretty privilege, I hardly see my face as central to my status in the world. But it is directly related to how I see myself and how I’d like to telegraph that version of me to others, and I’m not alone in this.

When the book she co-authored, Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change, was released in 2010, psychologist Vivian Diller’s audience was primarily in their 40s and 50s. The term “anti-aging” was en vogue at the time and Botox hadn’t quite hit the mainstream, so options for transforming your face were fairly limited, Diller says. Some women felt the pressure to take drastic measures, like full facelifts, to look younger. “If I were to write that book now,” Diller tells me, “it almost feels a little old-fashioned because the age that one thinks about aging or looking old is no longer in your 40s, 50s.” Instead, it’s late 20s. And it’s not just that people want to look younger, Diller says; they want to look ageless, to prevent the passing of time from occurring in the first place.

That an idealized image is so often conflated with a past self signifies there was a version (or will be a version) that was most aligned with our “true” identity. In Intact: In Defence of the Unmodified Body, University of Cambridge political philosophy professor Clare Chambers argues that people tend to believe there was a point in time, often in the past, where their bodies were most authentically their own: the post-college glow-up, the pre-baby body, the pre-menopause face.

Inevitably, we fail to embrace this edition of our appearance in the moment, only appreciating it much later as something we’ve lost. If you identify as young and beautiful or a parent or an athlete or a career-oriented professional, and the outer shell of that identity changes, you can fall into an existential crisis.

The result, Chambers tells me, is a feeling that our bodies as they are right now are never enough. “In this narrative, the body must be constantly modified to remain true to itself,” Chambers writes in her book. “But why on earth should that particular body, the one that has done so much less than you have, be the ‘real’ you?”

“The body we have right now is our authentic body,” Chambers tells me. “That’s simply the body we have.”

The idea that you will miss the current version of your body when it’s gone is also stressful, particularly when you are surrounded by “anti-aging” marketing making it clear that this is the phase of life everyone else is chasing, one which you’ll eventually look back upon with envy. Although she is only 24 years old, Medha Arora, an actor who lives in Toronto, is terrified of losing her fleeting youth and the benefits that being young and beautiful confers. The more she hears of women her age getting Botox, the more pressure she feels to preserve what she currently has and follow suit. “I feel so confident and I love how I look, and then as a result, there’s this anxiety that’s like, you have to do something to keep it,” she tells me.

The core tension at the center of today’s obsession with idealized bodies, American Society of Plastic Surgeons president Bob Basu tells me, is the mismatch between how people feel and how they look. No matter what you do to feel your best — therapy, sleep, a nutritious diet, a great sex life, strength training, fulfilling relationships — time, gravity, and…life will eventually leave their mark. “As we get older, we want to look as good as we feel,” Basu says. Now, we’re told, fillers, Botox, facelifts, and the like can help close that gap.

A better way of thinking about whether our bodies and identities are aligned is to be mindful of how it feels to be in them, Chambers says. “Do they feel like our own bodies? Do they feel healthy, comfortable, easy to live in, familiar to us?” she says.

Because pregnancy, menopause, illness, and disability can drastically alter the corporeal form, sometimes quite rapidly, the body and soul can feel diametrically opposed. The outer shell is foreign. But there are other ways to reconcile this that don’t involve neurotoxins.

In many ways, I feel especially youthful. Thanks to my longtime devotion to cardio and strength training, my body is sturdy. I try to eat as balanced as possible, and I remember to wear sunscreen most days. Sleep used to come easily and in great quantities, but a recent breakup derailed such rejuvenation. (I’m working on it.)

However, my face betrays these healthful habits. There are bags under my eyes, dark and heavy, and the tone of my skin is sallow and wan. I look in the mirror and see crow’s feet and forehead lines — memorials of happy, more expressive times — and emerging dark spots are coming to claim vengeance for the one summer in high school I decided to be really tan. While I may feel 23, I no longer appear to be.

Running on the hamster wheel of nostalgia often gets us nowhere; we’re chasing a face and body that’s lost to history. But that doesn’t mean that person didn’t exist. There is a difference, however, in grieving who we once were and grasping for who we once were.

“Grief is I miss who I was and I’m letting myself feel that fully. Grasping is I miss who I was, so I’m going to chase that through procedures, restriction, trying to reverse time,” licensed psychotherapist Annie Wright tells me. “Grief is a passage. Grasping is like a prison. And the cruel irony is that grasping is what most of the cosmetic and wellness industries are selling.”

When Wright’s clients find themselves hyperfocused on a past version of themselves, she invites them to consider what their younger self had access to that they lack now. “Honestly, it’s almost never just about the body,” she says. “It’s usually something like possibility, attention, lightness, being at the beginning of things.”

My 23-year-old self felt hungry for the opportunities that lay ahead; the 33-year-old is open to big shifts while still being grounded by the predictability and stability of routine. “We can’t compare across stages,” Wright says. “That’s really rigged. Instead, we ask, what’s uniquely available to me now that wasn’t available before?”

And what is available to you now may be access to filters on videoconferencing platforms, beauty products, and cosmetic procedures with the potential to change your appearance. “The mirror becomes a threat detection device,” Wright says. Clocking every life transition that manifests on our faces becomes a way of asking whether we’re still acceptable, still valuable, still safe.

If she could afford it, Patricia Catallo would get a facelift. The 62-year-old retired bartender from Philadelphia considered herself a “bombshell” earlier in life, but after a recent illness caused her to lose 60 pounds, Catallo says she wasn’t comfortable with the reflection staring back at her. “I felt like I just didn’t look good anymore and I felt invisible,” she tells me. Catallo was used to being approached by fellow shoppers in the store to get her opinion on what shampoo to buy, to chatting with the patrons at the bar where she worked. Now, she feels like someone who isn’t worth engaging with at all.

Talking to Catallo was like staring into the future, or maybe the sun — necessary and painful and impossible to ignore. Ageism is felt by both men and women, but people are generally more positive toward young women than older ones, research shows. Older women report feeling invisible and inconsequential, uncertain about their role in a world that coupled their utility with youth and attractiveness. This waning irrelevance has become somewhat of a stereotype, a seeming inevitability — “and that I think is not changing,” Diller, the psychologist and author, tells me. Is it wrong to want to avoid this fate myself?

If freezing and tightening away every little wrinkle to remain visible is the goal, it might be masking a deeper identity crisis. “Botox, fillers, lasers can soften the visual signs of aging, but they don’t resolve deeper questions about identity or self-worth,” Sonia Badreshia-Bansal, a dermatologist with offices in the Bay Area and Beverly Hills, tells me in an email. “When patients expect a procedure to fix something emotional, the results are almost always temporary in how they feel.”

Perhaps it’s for the best that I lack the funds for cosmetic procedures, as I should not be left unattended with an injector right now. Because, if I’m being totally honest, I’m unsure of my worth, of who I am, and therefore, how I should look, and I would most definitely be using procedures to fix something emotional.

While I was already meandering down the path of insecurity over the past few years, the end of my seven-year relationship a few months ago sent me spiraling toward full existential catastrophe. The life and future I’d envisioned were wiped away overnight, and in its place, a new face, haggard from crying and sleepless nights and poor nutrition. Noticeably more grey hair than a year prior. I questioned whether I, let alone anyone else, would find me desirable again. Still wading through the muck of self-doubt, wondering who I was supposed to be at this stage in my life, fixating on my appearance became a distraction from the lingering question of “What do I do now?” It’s easier to fix your face than to fix your life.

“What do I do now?” is a question best served for a therapist and not an injector, which doesn’t mean Sun Nguyen still doesn’t field it. A dermatology nurse practitioner in central Pennsylvania, Nguyen sometimes deals with patients who struggle to articulate why, exactly, they’re in her office; who, like me, are unsure of how they’re supposed to look at the present stage of their life. Instead of pushing procedures, Nguyen tries to help clients get introspective, especially when she sees them more often and has a relationship with them. “It’s deeper than a 15-minute exam can do,” she says.

Nguyen and other dermatologists I spoke to reiterated something so simple I’m embarrassed I’d never considered it: it’s important to know why you’re seeking cosmetic procedures, to understand your specific motivations for changing your face. And Nguyen is right that this soul searching should go beyond the brief questions your doctor asks in an exam room.

Someone who is driven by the fear of losing attention, relevance, and love, who is letting external voices into their head, is likely being driven not by their true self, says Wright, the psychotherapist. Instead, they are outsourcing their sense of self to the mirror.

When there’s a disconnect between what you see in the mirror and who you believe yourself to be, Chambers, the philosopher and author, suggests acceptance instead of rebellion. That means really settling into the fact that aging is a never-ending process, and will be an uphill battle if you choose to fight it. It starts from the moment we enter this mortal plane, and it never stops. She encourages us to push back against the idea that the pre-baby, pre-breakup, pre-accident, pre-sickness body was the “real” version of each of us, and to be okay in our bodies as they currently are.

That’s not to say we can’t delight in utilizing makeup, hair dye, tattoos, piercings, and even some cosmetic procedures as a form of self- or gender-expression, but it’s important to seriously consider how these modifications connect to an identity that goes beyond just “hot person” or “person in her 20s” or “me, but before this bad thing happened.” It requires getting comfortable with the uncomfortable notion that things change, that our lives and statuses change, often in ways that we don’t like. “In trying to pursue a sense of an aesthetic ideal, we risk not really keeping that connection between who we actually are and what we look like,” Chambers says.

My breakup, Chambers reminds me, has made me acutely aware of how I present to others and whether my appearance will be enticing enough for people to want to get to know what’s beyond the surface. I’m in my 30s and I’m not getting any younger. Still, I tell myself that my value as a friend, a daughter, a potential partner, a human does not depreciate even if society is hinting that it does. I’m reminded of this fact when speaking with Jen Janke, a 53-year-old elementary school teacher in Portland.

Her entire life, Janke was constantly reminded how attractive her parents were, and came to see the value in looking good. At her mother’s funeral, she remembers many guests mentioning how beautiful her mother was. “People also talked about how funny my mom was and thoughtful,” Janke tells me. “But I would want the first thing for someone to say is how thoughtful and funny she was.”

I agree. When my time expires and people are called to remember me, I hope they won’t talk about my face or my wrinkles or gray hair, or really anything about my appearance. What’s more lasting is how I make people feel.

“The most radical thing a woman can do in a culture that profits from her self-doubt, is to know herself well enough that she stops looking to her face for the answer,” Wright says. “Your face will keep changing, and your true self, that’s the one you should spend the time getting to know.”

The post How old am I supposed to look? appeared first on Vox.

They’re the last ones owned and operated by Ed Hackbarth, the founder of the Mexican fast food chain. Two of them feature the word “Original” under their marquees, even though that’s historically inaccurate — Hackbarth opened the first Del Taco in the nearby town of Yermo in 1964.

That hasn’t stopped thousands of devotees — myself included — from trekking to these Cal-Mex shrines to buy memorabilia, gawk at historical photos and gorge on hard shell tacos, burritos and bun tacos that they insist are tastier than the ones at regular Del Tacos.

Among those visitors was Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton.

He stopped by the Original Del Taco off 1st Avenue on Saturday after a town hall with lieutenant governor candidate and Barstow native Gloria Romero. His campaign posted a short video on social media of him standing outside the spot — the oldest operating Del Taco — while holding something that looked like a melted Frisbee.

It was what the place calls a Barstow Taco: ground beef, a few strips of lettuce, a blizzard of bright yellow cheese and a thick red tomato slice on top, all inside a hard taco shell.

Hilton gleefully wielded the crunchy mass with one hand as he pointed to the Original Del Taco sign with the other.

“My Barstow street taco, I’m going to enjoy,” he concluded in an accent from his native England, while giving a thumbs-up. “See you soon.”

He didn’t take a bite.

The social media blowback exploded like a digital Montezuma’s revenge. Haters ridiculed Hilton for visiting a Mexican restaurant in what seemed like an attempt to attract Latino voters — if he was going to do that, why on Earth pick a multimillion-dollar empire founded by a gringo? Others noted that “street tacos” are made with corn tortillas and bought from a food truck or street stall. As the author of a book about the history of Mexican food in the United States, I pointed out that this Del Taco isn’t actually the original, despite what the marquee says.

A humble man would have immediately owned up to his mistakes. Hilton is not a humble man.

To someone who pointed out that “Barstow street taco” is a misnomer, Hilton shot back, “It’s what they call it!” To someone who accused him of supporting bland corporations instead of mom-and-pop shops, Hilton responded that he went there because Romero once worked there.

“Not everything in life has to be turned into a political argument!!” he whined.

Hilton and his followers are treating Del Taco-gate as much ado about nada — and yet it tells voters everything they need to know about the man.

Endorsed by President Trump, he has consistently topped the polls this year, mainly because the many Democratic candidates have split the vote. Hilton has outperformed his main Republican rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, by promoting a message of positivity with weak-salsa slogans like “Make California Golden Again” and “Califordable.”

During debates, the former Fox News host has relied on his dry wit and posh tone to make his answers sound stronger than they are. He has especially focused on selling himself to Latinos. Months before announcing his run, we sat down at my wife’s restaurant in Santa Ana as he tried to pick my brain about this crucial swing vote, asking questions I kept telling him I had already answered in my columna.

Hilton is no pendejo. But I have to wonder about his judgment after that Del Taco video.

I have no problem with Hilton campaigning at a Mexican restaurant — it’s a political trope practiced by candidates of all persuasions. It’s unfair to expect a British immigrant who’s been in California only since 2012 to be fully versed in taco culture, as essential to the state as it is. And people shouldn’t bash him for highlighting a California culinary institution that’s one of the better legacy fast food chains out there, even though the Barstow Taco is, well, whatever. (Del Taco’s half-pound bean and cheese burrito, on the other hand, is as silky as a Luther Vandross slow jam.)

A proper hard shell taco is a beautiful thing. Just head out to San Bernardino’s Mitla Cafe, where Hackbarth’s former boss, Glen Bell, learned to make the tacos that turned the two of them into millionaires. But bragging about enjoying a hard shell taco nowadays is like showing up to a street takeover in a horse buggy.

As relevant to modern-day California as tamale pie, hard shell tacos are a reflection of Hilton’s pitch to voters: Instead of offering a bold vision for the future, he offers a return to a past that will never happen again and that wasn’t as great as people make it out to be.

I’ve tried to be as open as possible to Hilton’s campaign. California could benefit from a governor who didn’t emerge from the Sacramento swamp. It might even benefit from a Republican, as in the 2000s when Arnold Schwarzenegger forced Democrats to fight instead of fester.

But Hilton disappoints again and again. He launched his campaign in Huntington Beach, enamored of politicians there who seek to silo their city from the rest of California and humiliate liberals at every opportunity. His embrace of Trump‘s endorsement and refusal to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election expose him as a toady. Hilton’s ongoing boast that he is the candidate for legal immigrants disqualifies my father, who originally came to this country without papers yet has contributed more to the California experiment (and is now a U.S. citizen) than Hilton ever has.

I’ll even be gracious and excuse Hilton for wrongly calling the Del Taco he visited the original one — the background is admittedly confusing. But his Barstow street taco flub is a stand-in for his campaign, which will flop come November if he doesn’t get his Mexican meals straight.

Hilton told me over the phone that it was his first time eating at a Del Taco (he enjoyed the Barstow Taco off-camera but felt their fish taco was better). He didn’t stop by “for the food, frankly,” but rather for its meaning to Romero and to California entrepreneurship.

“The idea of going to the first location of a business that ends up going big is actually pretty cool,” the former restaurateur said, noting that he had shot a video at the San Bernardino location of the first McDonald’s, which is now a museum.

He didn’t get defensive when I told him the Del Taco wasn’t the first one and that what he ordered wasn’t actually a street taco — “I would say I’m learning, and I love learning and I love food, and exploring places and community through food, and I really would love to learn more, for sure.”

Hilton said he does enjoy “real” tacos but couldn’t name any places he favored. He asked for recommendations. I suggested we go get some tacos with my dad, and he immediately agreed.

“So you can explain to him how you’re the candidate of legal immigrants,” I added. “My dad came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.”

Hilton stayed silent for a second. “OK, let’s have that conversation,” he said.

Dear reader: Where should we eat?

The post How a fast food taco showed us who Steve Hilton really is appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

The 4-3 vote came at 4:25 a.m. after more than nine hours of testimony, with “bleary-eyed” lawmakers and spectators witnessing the outcome of a gerrymander battle triggered by the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling that declared Louisiana’s original Democratic district unconstitutional, according to local news reports.

Senate Bill 121, authored by Sen. Jay Morris (R-West Monroe), creates a winding 2nd District stretching from New Orleans through the River Parishes into Baton Rouge. The configuration could force Black congressmen Cleo Fields and Troy Carter to compete against each other for the state’s lone Democratic seat.

Democrats immediately condemned the map. “This 5-1 map is a political power grab,” said Sen. Sam Jenkins (D-Shreveport). “You’re minimizing opportunity in the other five districts.”

Morris defended the outcome, telling critics the new map “absolutely” passes scrutiny “compared to the 2024 map, which had the snake running from Shreveport almost all the way to New Orleans.”

The legislation advances to the full Senate before the June 1 deadline for finalizing Louisiana’s congressional maps.

Reporter Jake Sherman reacted to the controversial move, saying, “Louisiana goes for one Dem seat instead of 0.”

The post Overnight ‘power grab’ sees red state GOP vote at 4 AM to nix Dem seat appeared first on Raw Story.

Mary Trump, a psychologist and political commentator, directed readers’ attention to last week’s FBI raid on the office of L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, and the subsequent ruling of that state’s Supreme Court to strike down a redistricting referendum approved by voters.

“These may look like unrelated issues, but they are not,” she wrote.

Lucas had spearheaded the state’s voter approved redistricting referendum, which would have favored Democrats in four newly drawn districts, but the Virginia Supreme Court handed the GOP a major advantage by ruling the voter-approved measure unconstitutional on a technicality.

“We cannot let anybody tell us that these events are unrelated,” Mary Trump wrote. “This is how democratic erosion works in real time. One institution, in this case the judiciary, strips away the will of the voters, while another, in this case the FBI, raids a politician’s office for making a decision the federal government does not like.”

“This sends a chilling message to anyone who might stand up for Americans’ rights,” she added.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed that agents were conducting a criminal investigation but provided no additional information, and Mary Trump noted that Fox News produced live footage of feds entering her office and described the probe as a corruption investigation before any public court filings were made.

“The point, obviously, was to create spectacle and send a message to anybody who would dare stand up to the Trump regime,” she wrote.

“The redistricting referendum was a direct threat to Republican House incumbents and to the broader gerrymandering project that Donald started and has been championing,” Mary Trump added. “That is what triggered a federal raid on one of the referendum’s most vocal proponents, who also happens to be a strong Black woman.”

The post Trump family member drops sobering warning about president’s new ‘chilling’ move appeared first on Raw Story.

“It was greenish,” Ms. Grane said, her voice tinged with horror, referring to the patterned floor covering she found in a midcentury oceanfront co-op in the Hamptons hamlet of East Quogue, N.Y. “How on earth do you put carpet in a beach house?”

Other buyers who managed to get past the carpet might have been put off by the unit’s size — only 550 square feet. But for Ms. Grane, a New York City transplant from Barcelona, who is married to a fellow Spaniard and has two children, small was no deterrent. A vice president of marketing for Activia, a yogurt brand owned by Danone, she said she prefers modest beach houses like the cottages in her native Catalonia to the many hulking estates on Long Island’s East End.

The home where the carpet moldered was neither a cottage nor a maritime pleasure palace, but an apartment in a 1965 development, Round Dune, with four two-story circular buildings. The glass-walled structures sit on a sliver between Shinnecock Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, presenting watery views from their combined 76 units. Ms. Grane recalled first seeing “these little apartments all facing the ocean” each with a wide terrace. It was “a hidden gem among grand mansions,” she said.

In 2022, she and her husband, Ben Boix, a vice-president for customer relationship management at the eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, paid $415,000 for an upper-level co-op and began renovations that March. They completed the renovations in just eight weeks. And one of the first things to go was the offensive carpet.

The couple also tore out the unit’s single bedroom, to reduce obstructions to their view of the surrounding sea, sky and greenery. “Even when a space is small, when you have a glass wall everything looks enormous,” Ms. Grane said. They took advantage of the nearly 10-foot ceiling height to turn a windowed walk-in closet into a bunk room for their 14-year-old son, Adrian, and 8-year-old daughter, Emma, and to stack an adult loft bed above that, with storage inserted between the two sleeping areas. The bed is reached by a ladder in the living room.

An urge for simplicity dictated the interior palette of stark white and cream, with royal blue accents. The neutrals were inspired by Mediterranean beach houses, which reflect the white-hot brilliance of perpetual sun. Ms. Grane noted that blue is a Hamptons color that she frequently sees in striped fabrics.

Newly paneled, white-painted walls match the ceiling. Replacement floorboards were laid down, and the only rugs added were sisal.

Simplicity also governed the conversion of the 1960s kitchen into a space whose centerpiece is an island where Ms. Grane regularly makes paella. This feature is topped in a matte, sand-colored Cosentino surface material from Spain, which she said she preferred to bright, shiny marble; above it hang woven sea grass lamps from Morocco.

“Even our paella pans are beige,” she said. “Because everything, absolutely everything, had to speak the same language: calm.”

A cluttered wall of cabinetry was swapped out for open shelves custom ordered from Etsy. The rest of the kitchen was mostly sourced from Home Depot.

In short, nothing is precious here, except for maybe the kitchen exhaust system, a premium buy that Ms. Grane felt was necessary because of the small quarters and her love of cooking. “We didn’t want to spend a lot,” she said. “You are close to the beach; it is humid.”

Beach erosion is also a factor in her low-key attitude. In 2020, after 50 feet of beachfront had been wiped away by nor’easters in a single year, Round Dune initiated an emergency project to replace some dunes with Geocubes, sand-filled containers that keep erosion at bay. But no one knows what kind of devastation the next big storm will bring. The fleeting enjoyment of summer weekends has a whole new level of precarity.

The family, who live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pay regular visits from mid-May to October, when Round Dune closes for the season. Ms Grane blocks out at least two weeks in July for mother-daughter beach time with Emma while Adrian pursues summer activities in town.

With its sun-bleached vibe and single closet crammed with bathing suits and gear, the little unit serves activities that lie beyond its glass walls: splashing in the surf, swimming in the complex’s pool, playing tennis. The terrace, where the family takes most of its meals, is large enough for entertaining as many as a dozen paella eaters.

“Without the terrace, it would be very, very different,” Ms. Grane said. “I grab my glass of wine while the kids are doing other things and just sit there when the sun sets.”

The post They Found a Gem of an Apartment Among Hamptons Mansions appeared first on New York Times.