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Time Business News
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Time Business News
BROWARD COUNTY, FLORIDA
In the heart of the 17th Judicial Circuit, Judge Mara's family court is presiding over a crisis of silence and delay that is costing a Florida child his father, his stability, and his voice. Mr. Rubenstein—a law-abiding paralegal with an active federal security clearance—has been stripped of all meaningful contact with his son, not by evidence of abuse, but by a temporary emergency custody order that has now become a tool for permanent exclusion. The origins of this tragedy are as shocking as the ongoing injustice. In late April, Mr. Rubenstein's son experienced a severe psychiatric crisis, repeatedly throwing objects at Mr. Rubenstein from a distance. One of these objects—a hard dog bone—struck Mr. Rubenstein in the head, causing him to lose consciousness for over thirty minutes. His fiancée, who the GAL will not even allow the child to know about, provided life-saving CPR before paramedics arrived. Mr. Rubenstein required emergency trauma care and two metal staples in his head. Despite these circumstances—completely out of his control—the mother initiated litigation against Mr. Rubenstein while he was still in the ambulance on the way to the trauma center. At the May 7 custody hearing, Judge Mara did not even have Mr. Rubenstein's objection or motion for continuance at the outset. Only after her assistant brought the filings into the virtual hearing did the judge read them—live, apparently for the first time—before immediately ruling. Compounding the irregularities, Judge Mara attempted to remove Mr. Rubenstein's daughter as well, but only backed down after Mr. Rubenstein objected that this was not included in the mother's emergency motion. Despite holding only a temporary custody order, the mother and her counsel, Meaghan Marro, have treated this as a permanent termination of Mr. Rubenstein's rights. Mr. Rubenstein has been barred from even telling his son about his recent engagement. Requests for Father's Day contact and for sharing family news have been denied or ignored. The mother also removed Mr. Rubenstein's access to school records, only restoring them under pressure. Judge Mara, rather than enforcing compliance or ensuring accountability, appointed a Guardian ad Litem (GAL) whose own statements betray clear bias: the GAL disclosed her own son was previously Baker Acted and opined that Mr. Rubenstein's son should be with his mother—ignoring both the court-ordered need for psychiatric care and the ongoing DCF investigations. The maternal grandmother is now under two back-to-back DCF investigations for alleged physical abuse, yet Mr. Rubenstein's access is further restricted and his concerns minimized. Opposing counsel, Meaghan Marro, has consistently refused to respond to settlement offers, avoided substantive engagement, and—through procedural tactics—helped foster an environment in which the mother acts as if temporary full custody is permanent. The effect is devastating: Mr. Rubenstein is barred from his child's school, medical, and personal life, while the GAL cites only the current 'temporary' order as justification for continued exclusion, in violation of Florida law and the statutory mandate to protect the child's best interests. Florida law is clear. Under Fla. Stat. § 61.13, § 61.401, and § 61.403, the court and its agents are required to foster meaningful relationships with both parents and to protect children from unnecessary psychological harm. Instead, the system has rewarded stonewalling, denied transparency, and allowed uninvestigated allegations against a household member—now the subject of dual DCF cases—to persist while the child's father is shut out. Mr. Rubenstein's case is now on appellate review and is being referred for public oversight. Hundreds of pages of evidence, filings, and records document a pattern of judicial passivity, procedural delay, and a chilling indifference to the child's well-being and due process rights. As Father's Day arrives, one Florida child will not hear from his father—not because of any proven risk or judicial finding, but because the officials charged with protecting his interests refuse to act. The silence from the 17th Judicial Circuit is more than just bureaucracy—it is irreparable harm. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump accuses 'Mr. Nice guy' of violating trade agreement, markets respond
Trump accuses 'Mr. Nice guy' of violating trade agreement, markets respond originally appeared on TheStreet. President Donald Trump accuses China of breaching a preliminary trade agreement, escalating tensions amid ongoing tariff and policy disputes. Bitcoin is trading at $105,438.10 at press time, while the broader crypto markets are still in the red. Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to say, "So much for being Mr. Nice Guy.' The allegations come after current U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer has made a string of outspoken comments regarding China's non-compliance with its trade agreement. Greer voiced that the U.S. is "very concerned with China's non-compliance on trade" and that Beijing's behavior on trade is "completely unacceptable.' Greer asserted that the Chinese have been "slow on removing some tariffs countermeasures," suggesting that promised trade reforms have not materialized. He also indicated that, as an ongoing series of reports, the administration's total focus is on "monitoring China's compliance". He also noted that reports of there being attempts to encourage a direct call from Trump and Chinese President Xi right now are invaluable, particularly in this murky market and given the heightened uncertainty of the global trading vantage as of late. On May 12, Trump agreed to go with only a 30% tariff on China for 90 days. However, some netizen groups are claiming that the president might even go as far as to impose a 1000% tariff on China, but no such official statements have been made yet by the White House. Crypto markets are increasingly sensitive to macro policies. For instance, in 2019, Bitcoin rose 21% in a month during the tariff escalations, which was seen as a hedge against geopolitical risk. Additionally, in October 2022, BTC increased by 8.5% after weak U.S. manufacturing data was released, indicating possible Fed policy easing, as per Glassnode. Trump accuses 'Mr. Nice guy' of violating trade agreement, markets respond first appeared on TheStreet on May 30, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on May 30, 2025, where it first appeared. Sign in to access your portfolio
Indian Express
a day ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
On the campaign trail, Elon Musk juggled drugs and family drama
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump's closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities. Mr. Musk's drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it. It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview. At the same time, Mr. Musk's family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government, after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his businesses. Mr. Musk and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment this week about his drug use and personal life. He has previously said he was prescribed ketamine for depression, taking it about every two weeks. And he told his biographer, 'I really don't like doing illegal drugs.' The White House did not respond to questions about whether it had asked Mr. Musk to take drug tests. After this article was published on Friday morning, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, issued a statement to The New York Times crediting Mr. Musk with helping cut government waste. He declined to comment on Mr. Musk's drug use. As a large government contractor, Mr. Musk's aerospace firm, SpaceX, must maintain a drug-free work force and administers random drug tests to its employees. But Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the tests, according to people close to the process. SpaceX did not respond to questions about those warnings. Mr. Musk, who joined the president's inner circle after making a vast fortune on cars, satellites and rocket ships, has long been known for grandiose statements and a mercurial personality. Supporters see him as an eccentric genius whose slash-and-burn management style is key to his success. But last year, as he jumped into the political arena, some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children. This account of his behavior is based on private messages obtained by The Times as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him. This year, some of his longtime friends have renounced him, pointing to some of his public conduct. 'Elon has pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,' said Philip Low, a neuroscientist and onetime friend of Mr. Musk's who criticized him for his Nazi-like gesture at a rally. And some women are challenging Mr. Musk for control of their children. One of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world. Ms. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy's safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health. Another mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that she had a secret relationship with Mr. Musk and had given birth to his 14th known child. Mr. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity concealed, but she refused. He sought a gag order in New York to force Ms. St. Clair to stop speaking publicly, she said in an interview. Mr. Musk has described some of his mental health issues in interviews and on social media, saying in one post that he has felt 'great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.' He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants. He plays video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to people familiar with his habits, and takes weight-loss medication. And he posts day and night on his social media platform, X. Mr. Musk has a history of recreational drug use, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Some board members at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have worried about his use of drugs, including Ambien, a sleep medication. In an interview in March 2024, the journalist Don Lemon pressed him on his drug use. Mr. Musk said he took only 'a small amount' of ketamine, about once every two weeks, as a prescribed treatment for negative moods. 'If you've used too much ketamine, you can't really get work done, and I have a lot of work,' he said. He had actually developed a far more serious habit, The Times found. Mr. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him. He also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events. The Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of the actor Matthew Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control. By the spring of last year, Mr. Musk was ramping up criticism of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., particularly his policies on illegal immigration and diversity initiatives. Mr. Musk was also facing federal investigations into his businesses. Regulators were looking into crashes of Tesla's self-driving cars and allegations of racism at its factories, among other complaints. 'There are at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down,' he wrote in a text message to someone close to him last May. 'The Biden administration views me as the #2 threat after Trump.' 'I can't be president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will,' he added. He publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in July. Around that time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues, according to people familiar with the conversations. On Oct. 5, he appeared with Mr. Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down around the candidate. That evening, Mr. Musk shared his excitement with a person close to him. 'I'm feeling more optimistic after tonight,' he wrote in a text message. 'Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.' 'This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,' Mr. Musk added about an hour later. ''Lasers' from space.' After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect's Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Mr. Musk attended personnel meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies. By 2022, Mr. Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms. Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together. But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world's declining birthrates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth. Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations. Mr. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Musk, but said, 'Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.' Even as Mr. Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Ms. Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions. Ms. Boucher reconciled with Mr. Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Ms. Zilis was expecting a third child with Mr. Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth. Ms. Boucher and Mr. Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Mr. Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight. By mid-2023, unknown to either Ms. Boucher or Ms. Zilis, Mr. Musk had started a romantic relationship with Ms. St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City. Ms. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Mr. Musk told her he wasn't dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Ms. Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Mr. Musk's life. Ms. St. Clair said that Mr. Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child. 'He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,' Ms. St. Clair said. Ms. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Mr. Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet. On election night, Ms. St. Clair and Mr. Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Mr. Trump's victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said. He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by The Times and first reported by The Journal. But she did not want her son's paternity to be hidden. After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Mr. Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support. Mr. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by Ms. St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy. Some of Mr. Musk's onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior. In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Mr. Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies. 'There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,' Dr. Harris wrote. Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Mr. Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. 'My heart goes out to you,' he told the crowd. 'It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.' Mr. Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a 'positive gesture.' Dr. Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Mr. Musk a sharp email, shared with The Times, cursing him 'for giving the Nazi salute.' When Mr. Musk didn't respond to the message, Dr. Low posted his concerns on social media. 'I have no sympathy for this behavior,' he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. 'At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.' The next month, Mr. Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. 'This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!' Mr. Musk shouted to the cheering crowd. Some conference organizers told The Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use.
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' Advertisement He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former president Obama, who once praised Mr. Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Mr. Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012, and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Advertisement Through Mr. Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963, and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Mr. Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Mr. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Advertisement Mr. Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives, he grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Mr. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Advertisement Mr. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Mr. Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967 but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Mr. Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. Advertisement 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Mr. Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' Advertisement He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Mr. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the United States. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University, and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Mr. Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Mr. Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Presley Chweneyagae, acclaimed actor of ‘Tsotsi,' dies at 40
Mr. Chweneyagae appeared in stagings of works by Shakespeare, playing the title character of 'Hamlet,' Mark Antony in 'Julius Caesar,' and Bottom and Puck in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' For 'Tsotsi' - his first feature film, released the year he turned 21 - Mr. Chweneyagae immersed himself in a more contemporary drama, one set close to home, in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. He played a gang leader hardened beyond his years by the loss of his mother to AIDS, the abuse visited upon him by his alcoholic father, and the hardship of life in a shantytown and on the streets. He is known, simply, as 'Tsotsi,' or hoodlum. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The film, directed by Gavin Hood and based on a 1980 novel by the venerated South African playwright Athol Fugard, was unsparing in its depiction of violence. Advertisement 'The character Tsotsi, played by the charismatic newcomer Presley Chweneyagae, seems to have consumed his share of big-screen shoot-'em-ups,' wrote New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, calling him 'as compact as Al Pacino's Tony Montana and just as lethal.' Advertisement In a critical moment of the film, Mr. Chweneyagae's character prowls a wealthy neighborhood, shoots a young woman, drives off with her luxury car and soon discovers that her baby is in the back seat. He takes the infant home to his shack and attempts to care for him, fashioning newspapers into diapers. Tsotsi struggles to deviate from the violence that has reigned over his life. When the baby grows hungry, he orders another mother at gunpoint to breastfeed the child. But the boy gradually kindles in Tsotsi a tenderness that he seems not to have known he had. 'How strange, a movie where a bad man becomes better, instead of the other way around,' film critic Roger Ebert wrote of 'Tsotsi.' Praising the film for not sentimentalizing poverty, Ebert described the story as one of 'deep emotional power' about a 'young killer … who is transformed by the helplessness of a baby' and 'powerless before eyes more demanding than his own.' 'It's a story about hope, it's a story about forgiveness, and it also deals with the issues that we are facing as South Africans: AIDS, poverty, and crime,' Mr. Chweneyagae told Agence France-Presse shortly before 'Tsotsi' received the Oscar for best foreign film in 2006. 'But at the same time,' he added, 'it could take place anywhere in the world.' Mr. Chweneyagae was born in Mafikeng, in South Africa's North West province, on Oct. 19, 1984. He acted in church plays and community theater before beginning drama lessons at 10. His film credits after 'Tsotsi' include his performance as a prisoner in 'Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' (2013), a biopic about Nelson Mandela. Advertisement Mr. Chweneyagae attracted a devoted following in South Africa for his performance in 'The River,' a TV series that ran from 2018 to 2024, about two families, one rich and one poor, connected by South Africa's diamond mining industry. His character, Cobra, inspired a spin-off, 'Cobrizi.' With Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, he wrote a play, 'Relativity,' about a serial killer in a South African township and the lives of the many people around him. Mr. Chweneyagae was married and had several children, but a complete list of survivors was not immediately available. For his performance in 'Tsotsi,' Mr. Chweneyagae drew on his traumatic experience being mugged shortly before he agreed to take on the film role. 'When you are a victim of crime, you do tend to think, 'If I ever come face to face with that person, I'll kill them or do something to get back at them,'' he told the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader. But after working on 'Tsotsi,' he added, 'I can see that people do not choose where they come from. They do not choose their financial background or their social background. It's just circumstances that force them to be what they are.'
