Author: Reporter

Sheetal Deo was shocked when she got a letter from her Queens apartment building’s co-op board calling her Diwali decoration “offensive” and demanding she take it down. “My decoration said ‘Happy Diwali’ and had a swastika on it,” said Deo, a physician, who was celebrating the Hindu festival of lights. The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein. But in the West, this symbol is often equated to...

Against a backdrop of Russian bombardments, border closures and a nail-biting 2,150-mile truck journey across Europe, Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum has teamed up with the National Art Museum of Ukraine to secretly bring dozens of 20th century Ukrainian avant-garde artworks to Madrid for a unique exhibition and a show of support for the war-torn country. “In The Eye Of The Hurricane. Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s,” opened to the public on November 29, featuring some 70 works mostly from the Kyiv gallery and the country’s theater, music and cinema museum. It will run until next April. The show constitutes the...

Ukrainian video-game vendor Roman Kryvyi, fresh from a soccer game on a snow-blanketed field in suburban Kyiv, sat up close to a TV in a kebab shop as intermittent city power returned just in time for the World Cup game between Wales and England on November 29. For the 22-year-old soccer buff, there was no question about which side to support in the matchup: He remembers how he was crestfallen — rolling on the floor in despair and on the verge of tears — when Wales ousted his beloved Ukraine in the qualifiers. The grudge hasn’t worn off. “Only...

Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts and social media researchers that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus. Eagle-eyed users spotted the change on November 28, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” By November 29, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform’s hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk....

Pedro Meraz said that living in Colima, Mexico, was like living in a war zone, with shootings, burning cars and dismembered bodies being left outside of schools. When his wife Rocio Gonzalez, a 28-year-old lawyer who worked with abused women, began receiving death threats from a cartel and the local authorities ignored her pleas for assistance, they knew they had to leave. “They knew where we lived and what car we drove,” said Meraz, 41, who taught at The University of Colima, near the Pacific Coast and about 300 miles (485 kilometers) west of Mexico City. “Feeling that you...

A coalition of conservative-leaning states is making a last-ditch effort to keep in place a Trump-era public health rule that allows many asylum seekers to be turned away at the southern U.S. border. On November 21, the 15 states filed what is known as a motion to intervene — meaning they want to become part of the legal proceedings surrounding the public health rule referred to as Title 42. The rule, first invoked by Trump in 2020, uses emergency public health authority to allow the United States to keep migrants from seeking asylum at the border, based on the...