Author: Reporter

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister, and several other officials were found dead on May 20, hours after their helicopter crashed in a foggy, mountainous region of the country’s northwest, state media reported. The crash comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by the Israel-Hamas war, during which Raisi, who was 63, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel in April. Khamenei announced on May 20 that Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, would serve as the country’s acting president until elections are held. During Raisi’s term in office, Iran enriched...

The helicopter crash in which Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials were killed is likely to reverberate across the Middle East, where Iran’s influence runs wide and deep. That is because Iran has spent decades supporting armed groups and militants in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, allowing it to project power and potentially deter attacks from the United States or Israel, the sworn enemies of its 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tensions have never been higher than they were in April, when Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched hundreds...

Find a globe in your local library or classroom and try this experiment. Close your eyes, spin it, and drop a finger randomly on its curved, glossy surface. You are likely to pinpoint a spot in the water, which covers 71% of the planet. Maybe you will alight on a place you have never heard of, or a spot that no longer exists after a war or because of climate change. Perhaps you will feel inspired to find out who lives there and what it is like. Look carefully, and you will find the cartouche — the globemaker’s signature...

A month before Kevin Costner puts the first installment of his multi-chapter Western “Horizon: An American Saga” into theaters, the actor-director came to the Cannes Film Festival to unveil his self-financed passion project. “Two of my boys are out fishing right now,” Costner said with a grin in an interview at the Carlton Hotel. “And the three girls found their way onto a boat. So dad’s in here, stumping for his movie.” The movie is actually two, or if Costner has his way, four. “Horizon: Chapter One,” which runs three hours, will be released by Warner Bros. in theaters...

Only recently has George Miller realized just how influential his medical education was to the world of “Mad Max.” Miller was briefly a doctor before finding filmmaking and his twin brother, whom he attended university with, remained one. As a resident at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Miller saw people in birth and in death, in moments of, he said, “extremis.” Extremis — a Latin word that literally translates as “at the point of death” — would be a fairly apt way to describe the post-apocalypse wasteland of “Mad Max.” It could apply to, well, all of the characters,...

Of the many quotations and slogans that flitter through Francis Ford Coppola’s idea-stuffed, open-hearted, unabashedly optimistic “Megalopolis,” one that particularly resonates with the director is: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we’re free.” “That’s me making this film,” Coppola said, speaking on a hotel terrace in Cannes the day after “Megalopolis” premiered at the French festival. “To all of the studio big shots, I proved that I’m free and they’re not. Because they don’t dare leap into the unknown. And I do. That’s the only way to prove that you’re free.” Coppola pauses and then adds,...