Social Responsibility

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced on Sunday night that he has chosen Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily’s List and a former labor leader, to fill the vacancy left in the Senate by the death of Dianne Feinstein.Ms. Butler, 44, has been a fixture in California politics for nearly 15 years as a former leader of the state’s largest labor union and an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to take the helm at Emily’s List, the fund-raising powerhouse dedicated to electing female candidates and supporters of reproductive rights.Senator Feinstein died…

Ukraine’s government said on Sunday it was confident that the United States would continue to support it in its war with Russia, even after the House passed a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown that did not include any additional money for Kyiv.The White House and leaders of both parties in the Senate had pushed for more Ukraine funding to be included in the bill, which passed late Saturday. Members of both parties said they were confident that further financial commitments would be agreed to, but the failure to do so on Saturday highlighted the decreasing willingness of…

Kevin McCarthy is facing the most dire threat yet to his speakership after teaming up with Democrats to avert a government shutdown, leading his most outspoken Republican critic, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, to declare that he would follow through on threats to try to remove Mr. McCarthy from his post.Mr. Gaetz’s announcement on Sunday came a day after Mr. McCarthy, in a stunning reversal, dropped his party’s demands for border security measures and budget cuts and turned to Democrats to help him steer a 45-day stopgap spending bill through the House. The backlash was almost immediate, as Republican hard-liners…

From a distance, the cemetery looks much like any other in Israel, but examine the tombs closely and a startling fact is revealed: Here are buried Jews, Muslims and Christians.The graveyard lies in the Oasis of Peace, a small village off the main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and home to some 70 Arab and Jewish families — all citizens of Israel — who have moved here from across the country with the intention of creating a shared life, side by side.In this village, children learn both Arabic and Hebrew in school, and celebrate Hanukkah, Ramadan and Christmas.“I had…

Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, pulled a fire alarm in the House Cannon office building on Saturday as his party was trying to delay a vote on a stopgap spending bill, prompting an evacuation of the building and investigations by the Capitol Police and the House Administration Committee.The alarm was triggered at the same time that House Democrats at the Capitol were stalling a vote on a spending measure to keep the government operating for another 45 days. Speaker Kevin McCarthy had unveiled the bill just minutes earlier, and Democrats were scrambling to read the bill and determine…

Under the guise of saving refugees, the United Arab Emirates is running an elaborate covert operation to back one side in Sudan’s spiraling war — supplying powerful weapons and drones, treating injured fighters and airlifting the most serious cases to one of its military hospitals, according to a dozen current and former officials from the United States, Europe and several African countries.The operation is based at an airfield and a hospital in a remote town across the Sudanese border in Chad, where cargo planes from the Emirates have been landing on a near-daily basis since June, according to satellite imagery…

For generations, she was an iconic American political figure — a leader on issues from the environment to assault-style weapons, the longest-serving senator ever to represent California, the first woman to make it to the top of San Francisco’s political system, catapulted there after a still-shocking burst of gun violence.On Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein died at the age of 90. In the months leading up to her death, colleagues, critics and an increasingly restive field of aspiring successors had questioned her health and fitness for office — a concern, her supporters noted, that few have raised for male octogenarians in…

His television roles varied from Inspector Maigret to Edward VII, Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. And in film he played characters as different as Albert Spica, the coarse and violent gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” and the benign Professor Dumbledore.Mr. Gambon took over the role of Dumbledore, a central character in the Harry Potter saga, when Richard Harris, who had originated it, died in 2002. Reviewing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” in which he first appeared in the role, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film,…