The notice from the office of the special counsel Jack Smith suggested that an indictment was on the horizon in the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.
Massive plumes of smoke from hundreds of Canadian fires, enveloped millions in smoke, triggering dangerous air quality warnings in both countries and turning skies an ashen orange.
The flights to California illustrate the broader bet Gov. Ron DeSantis has made that the animating energy in the G.O.P. has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism.
The New York Times (June 6, 2023) – Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes.
Written and photographed by Raymond Zhong, who joined scientists on a 90-mile raft expedition through the canyon.
Since 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam has been backing up the Colorado for nearly 200 miles, in the form of America’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Engineers constantly evaluate water and electricity needs to decide how much of the river to let through the dam’s works and out the other end, first into the Grand Canyon, then into Lake Mead and, eventually, into fields and homes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
Spend long enough in the canyon, and you might start feeling a little unmoored from time yourself.
North Canyon, and a spring at Vasey’s Paradise.
The immense walls form a kind of cocoon, sealing you off from the modern world, with its cell signal and light pollution and disappointments. They draw your eyes relentlessly upward, as in a cathedral.
You might think you are seeing all the way to the top. But up and above are more walls, and above them even more, out of sight except for the occasional glimpse. For the canyon is not just deep. It is broad, too — 18 miles, rim to rim, at its widest. This is no mere cathedral of stone. It is a kingdom: sprawling, self-contained, an alternate reality existing magnificently outside of our own.
And yet, the Grand Canyon remains yoked to the present in one key respect. The Colorado River, whose wild energy incised the canyon over millions of years, is in crisis.
Experts suspect an explosion collapsed the dam on the Dnipro River. Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other, and residents downstream were forced to evacuate to escape the cascading waves.
In a stunning announcement, the tour, along with the DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said the rivals had agreed to create a “new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.”
The smoke was pouring across the border from Canada, where hundreds of wildfires remain unchecked, and the hazardous smoke conditions are expected to linger through Wednesday and perhaps until later in the week.
In a remarkable court scene, the prince took the stand for five hours to make his case that his phone was hacked by a newspaper group, as a lawyer for the defense grilled him about his claims.
Kyiv has not formally announced the start of operations. But on Tuesday, Ukraine said the Russians had blown up a dam on the Dnipro River, potentially imperiling residents and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
The S.E.C. said the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange mixed billions of dollars in customer funds and secretly sent them to a separate company controlled by Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao.
The New York Times (June 5, 2023) – Each spring, opalescent icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet pass through Iceberg Alley, off the eastern edge of Canada, on a slow-motion journey southward.
“I never trust the mind of an iceberg,” Cecil Stockley told me. He estimates its length, multiplies by five and keeps his boat at least that distance away.
Dave Boyd said his safety rules depend on which type of iceberg he’s dealing with. “A tabular is generally pretty mellow,” Mr. Boyd explained as we floated off the coast of Newfoundland, referring to icebergs with steep sides and large, flat tops. “But a pinnacle” — a tall iceberg with one or more spires — “can be a real beast.”
Dave Boyd, who captains tour boats, also runs Prime Berth, a museum and heritage center in Twillingate. Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Barry Rogers doesn’t just look at an iceberg; he listens to it, as well. When the normal Rice Krispies-like pop of escaping air bubbles gives way to a much louder frying-pan sizzle, the iceberg may be about to roll over or even split apart, he explained.
In 1912, one such iceberg struck the starboard side of the Titanic on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. Over the years, plenty of others have done lesser damage to ships, oil rigs and even the occasional unlucky — or foolhardy — kayaker.
Civilians have killed at least 160 gang members in Haiti, a human rights group says. Residents say they feel safer, but others worry that it will lead to even more violence.
Train travel in the country has gotten much safer, Friday’s disaster notwithstanding, but the government still puts high-profile projects ahead of basic safety improvements, analysts say.
A Supreme Court ruling barred Oklahoma from prosecuting crimes committed by Native Americans on tribal land, but some Black tribal members are still being prosecuted because they lack “Indian blood.”
With single-party statehouse control at its highest level in decades, legislators across much of the country leaned into cultural issues and bulldozed the opposition.
The disaster killed at least 288 people, and a preliminary government report described it as a “three-way accident” involving two passenger trains and an idled cargo train. Officials were investigating possible signal failure.
The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow’s army, while demonizing the West as “gangsters.” One school features a “sniper”-themed math class.
Doctors at the Allina Health System, a wealthy nonprofit in the Midwest, aren’t allowed to see poor patients or children with too many unpaid medical bills.
Fighting for change has cost Narges Mohammadi her career, separated her from family and deprived her of liberty. But a jail cell has not succeeded in silencing her.
A coordinated effort financed by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund is offering huge paydays to some of the sport’s biggest stars if they join Saudi Arabia’s best teams.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 4, 2023: The summer reading issue lands this weekend, 56 pages filled with suggestions of books to keep you company at the beach or in that shady mothballed nook you discovered in your rental share. The issue closes with a beautiful photo essay of swimmers pictured underwater, from an art book that evokes summer as vividly as fried clam strips and soft-serve ice cream: “Swimmers,” by Larry Sultan.
In “The Bathysphere Book,” Brad Fox chronicles the fascinating Depression-era ocean explorations of William Beebe.
Consider the siphonophore. An inhabitant of the lightless ocean, it looks like a single organism, but is actually a collection of minute creatures, each with its own purpose, working in harmony to move, to eat, to stay alive. They seem impossible but they are real. In 1930 William Beebe was 3,000 feet underwater in a bathysphere, an early deep-sea submersible, when he spotted a huge one: a writhing 20-yard mass whose pale magenta shone impossibly against the absolute blackness of the water. As you can imagine, it made an impression.
Henry Hoke’s latest novel, “Open Throat,” follows an observant — and starving — cougar living in the Los Angeles hills surrounding the Hollywood sign.
There is a moment toward the end of “Open Throat,” Henry Hoke’s slim jewel of a novel, where the narrator, a mountain lion living in the desert hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, falls asleep and dreams of Disneyland. It will be hard for those who haven’t yet read this propulsive novel to understand, but the lion’s waking life at this moment is so precarious that this slippage into pleasant dream left me scared to turn the page.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 4, 2023) – California is the place where the future happens, for good and ill. That’s part of its magic. Read our first-ever California Issue to find out what roads the state will take us down next.
Inside: A fight over a parking lot that explains the housing crisis; the future of California’s power to shape national policy; how the state is adapting to a warming world — and more.
From reparations to tax revolts, the Golden State tries out new ideas all the time. What roads will its latest experiments send us down?
By Laila Lalami
I remember my first glimpse into the future. In August 1992, when I arrived in California as a student, I discovered during orientation that the university required all incoming students to have something called an email account. To access it, I had to call up a text-based mail client on Unix, using a series of line commands. If I needed a file that sat on a university computer in New York, I could use file transfer protocol to download it in Los Angeles, the whole process taking no more than a few minutes. That’s brilliant, I remember thinking.
For a while this winter, seemingly every text message that Buffy Wicks received asked if she was running for Congress. Representative Barbara Lee, of California’s 12th District, which includes Oakland, had announced that she would enter the race for Dianne Feinstein’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. This decision by Lee, who is 76, created a rare opportunity for the next generation of California Democrats to vie for federal office. And Wicks — a 45-year-old State Assembly member who lives in Lee’s district and was last re-elected with 85 percent of the vote — seemed like a natural candidate.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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