Category: News

Air passengers across the United States faced extensive flight cancellations and delays this weekend, caused by a boom in travel demand coupled with widespread staffing shortages.

From Friday through Sunday, airlines that fly within, into, or out of the United States canceled more than 1,400 flights, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, stranding and angering some passengers headed for long-awaited summer vacations. In addition, more than 14,000 flights were delayed this holiday weekend, according to the site’s data.

Some airlines seemed to be struggling to handle passenger volume that approached or in some cases even exceeded prepandemic levels. On Friday, the Transportation Safety Administration screened more passengers — 2.49 million people — than on any other day this year. That surpassed the 2.18 travelers screened on July 1, 2019, before the pandemic.

The experience was frustrating for some passengers on U.S. carriers. On Saturday, 1,048 — or 29 percent — of Southwest Airlines flights were delayed, as were 28 percent of American Airlines flights, according to FlightAware. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines had similar problems, with 21 percent and 19 percent of their flights also delayed. On Sunday, the middle of the holiday weekend, travelers seemed to be getting a respite from the worst of the problems.

“Obviously, if it’s your flight that is delayed or canceled, it’s a disaster,” said Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive who now runs the airline consultancy R.W. Mann & Company.

In a typical month, Mr. Mann noted, about 20 percent of flights are delayed or canceled. But this holiday weekend, he said, it was about 30 percent — a 50 percent increase. “It’s a little bit worse than usual,” he said.

Adding to the pressure on air carriers this weekend was a glitch in the pilot-scheduling system at American Airlines that enabled pilots to drop thousands of flight assignments for July. The airline said on Saturday that it did not anticipate any “operational impact” because of the glitch.

But the Allied Pilots Association, the union for American Airlines pilots, said that the airline had unilaterally reinstated the dropped trips without the agreement of the pilots. The union said it was pressing the airline to pay an “inconvenience premium” to pilots affected by the scheduling system problems.

In a nod to mounting passenger frustrations this summer, Ed Bastian, the chief executive of Delta Air Lines, issued an apology last week.

“I know many of you may have experienced disruptions, sometimes significant, in your travels as we build our operation back from the depths of 2020 while accommodating a record level of demand,” Mr. Bastian wrote in a post on LinkedIn. He added: “Though the majority of our flights continue to operate on time, this level of disruption and uncertainty is unacceptable.”

In an email, Morgan Durrant, a spokesman for Delta, said the airline was managing “the compounding factors” of bad weather and air traffic control delays, which affect the availability of flight crews. The airline was “working around the clock to make Delta’s operation as resilient as possible to minimize the ripple effect of disruptions,” Mr. Durrant said. “Even so, some operational challenges are expected this holiday weekend.”

As the holiday weekend progressed, however, the spate of flight problems began to abate. By Sunday evening, Delta had canceled just 1 percent of its flights, and just 15 percent of Southwest Airlines flights had been delayed, according to FlightAware.

Southwest said on Sunday that it was delivering “a safe, reliable experience across our network today with currently, less than 10 total cancellations” for the day.

American Airlines and United Airlines did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

AKRON, Ohio — A 25-year-old Black man who was killed last week by police officers in Akron, Ohio, suffered more than 60 gunshot wounds but was unarmed at the time, the police chief said Sunday.

That detail was among the facts that began to emerge in the killing of the man, Jayland Walker, who died last Monday after fleeing the police during what was supposed to be a routine traffic stop. At a news conference on Sunday, the police released body camera videos of the pursuit and shooting that showed officers’ actions but deepened many questions around his death, which remains under investigation.

Mr. Walker had one traffic ticket and no criminal record. The police said they initially sought to pull him over for an equipment violation and a traffic violation.

Eight officers who were directly involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave according to department policy, the police said.

Following the release of the videos, hundreds of protesters marched in downtown Akron, demanding justice for Mr. Walker and decrying police violence, as Mr. Walker’s family urged the community to remain peaceful.

In one video, a popping sound can be heard at one point, and an officer reports gunfire coming from the door of Mr. Walker’s car. The shot itself is not visible from the footage, but during the news conference, footage from outside the car was shown that seemed to capture a muzzle flash coming from Mr. Walker’s driver’s side door.

The police said during the news conference that a handgun was later found in Mr. Walker’s car and that a bullet casing was found where they said he fired and that it was consistent with the weapon found in Mr. Walker’s vehicle. A still photo released by the police showed a handgun on the seat, along with a gold ring. Mr. Walker’s girlfriend died recently in a car accident.

Bobby DiCello, a lawyer for the Walker family, said Mr. Walker had only recently obtained the gun. “Jayland was not familiar with firearms, and we do not know if it accidentally fired,” he said. “But police did find no bullets in the handgun when they found it in the car after his death.”

In the news conference, the police did not address whether the handgun in the car was unloaded but said there was a loaded magazine on the seat.

As the chase continued, the footage shows an officer saying that Mr. Walker’s car is slowing down. Seconds later, Mr. Walker, wearing a ski mask, exits the vehicle and begins to flee on foot.

The chase was brief, and footage appears to show a number of officers pursuing Mr. Walker, weapons drawn, into a nearby parking lot while shouting at him. Police officers had initially deployed Tasers but were unsuccessful, the police said. A few seconds later, the officers open fire, and Mr. Walker drops to the ground.

Stephen L. Mylett, the Akron police chief, said he wasn’t sure how many total shots had been fired at Mr. Walker. He could not confirm the exact number of bullets that struck him (though he cited the wounds reported by the medical examiner), but he anticipated the number would be “very high.”

Chief Mylett said the officers contended that Mr. Walker had quickly turned toward officers and made a motion toward his “waist area.” The chief confirmed that Mr. Walker was unarmed after fleeing his car, however.

But Mr. DiCello said that in an earlier meeting that included the chief and the family, the chief said he had not seen evidence that suggested the officers’ lives were threatened.

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting an inquiry. After that is complete, the case will be turned over to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for review.

The decision of whether to charge the officers involved with a crime will be determined by prosecutors, but charges have rarely been filed in similar cases of shootings involving the police. If a gun was fired during the chase, that fact could weigh heavily on the decision of whether to prosecute, and it could provide a measure of credibility to officers’ claims that they were in danger.

Mr. DiCello criticized how the police portrayed Mr. Walker in the news conference. “They want to turn him into a masked monster with a gun,” he said. The family’s lawyers also questioned the city’s release of only parts of the videos at the news conference and urged that it release all of the video.

The police said they planned to release all of the body camera footage captured by officers at the shooting. This, they said, would include footage from the eight officers involved directly in the shooting along with five others who were at the scene.

The release of the video on Sunday raised tensions that were already high in Akron because of the shooting. One day after more than 100 demonstrators gathered just outside downtown, chanting and holding signs, protests continued with hundreds participating in a march and rally at City Hall organized by the Akron N.A.A.C.P.

“It just keeps perpetuating, the same thing, over and over,” said Chris Mercury, 41, an African American barbershop owner in Akron. He added that people in the country would keep thinking that it was the person’s fault that this happened.

“And at the end of the day,” said his wife, Monique, a retail fashion store owner, “the threat to people who were in the same position of Walker, the danger is immediate no matter what they do.

“People from all races and backgrounds need to realize this is happening, and it just seems to be getting worse.”

The Walker family urged the city not to resort to violence.

“If you can do anything for the family, please give peace, give dignity and give justice a chance for Jayland,” Mr. DiCello said on Sunday. “My clients are private people. Jayland was a private kid. He wasn’t married. He wasn’t a criminal. He obviously was in pain. He didn’t deserve to die.”

Kim Barker and Steve Eder contributed reporting.

Several people were killed and wounded in a shooting at a mall in Copenhagen on Sunday, the local police said.

Soren Thomassen of the Copenhagen police did not elaborate on how many people had been killed, and he declined to offer any details about a motive, saying it was too early. Information about the conditions of those wounded was not made available.

He said the police had taken a 22-year-old Dane into custody in connection with the shooting. The police said they had not ruled out the possibility that more than one person was involved in the gunfire.

“We have several dead and injured,” Mr. Thomassen said at a news conference at the police headquarters that was briefly punctuated by sirens in the background.

“As you can clearly hear, it’s busy,” he said. “What happens in a tragic event is that we go in on many fronts.”

The shooting happened at Field’s, the largest shopping center in Denmark.

Video and images posted on social media showed people sprinting out of the mall and ambulances lining its exterior. Armed police officers were running near the mall and a helicopter hovered overhead.

A mall employee told a local news outlet that “masses of people” had run to seek shelter in the Kentucky Fried Chicken at Field’s. Staff members barricaded the doors and remained there for about 45 minutes, the employee said.

An eyewitness, Mahdi Al-Wazni, told TV 2 News that he had seen the gunman.

“He seemed violent and angry, and he was shouting as he ran and took the gun and smashed the windows,” he said. “You’d think it was an action movie as he walked. He seemed very proud of what he did, I could tell.”

Other eyewitnesses described scenes of panic and of employees helping shoppers flee through the back rooms of stores.

The “American Cancer Society of Michigan,” state authorities say, was a fake charity. And not even a good fake.

It was not in Michigan, for one thing. When the group applied to the Internal Revenue Service to become a tax-exempt nonprofit in 2020, it listed its address as a rented mailbox on Staten Island. It was not the American Cancer Society, either: In fact, the real American Cancer Society had already warned the I.R.S. that the leader of the sound-alike group, Ian Hosang, was running a fraud.

The I.R.S. approved the group anyway. Soon after, it also approved another operation run by Mr. Hosang: “the United Way of Ohio,” which was also registered to the Staten Island address.

Mr. Hosang, 63, is now accused by prosecutors in New York of operating a long-running charity fraud that has astounded nonprofit regulators and watchdogs — and raised concerns about the I.R.S.’s ability to serve as gatekeeper for the American charity system.

Not because the alleged scheme was so good.

Because it was terrible. And it worked.

Mr. Hosang — a convicted stock-market fraudster once accused of dangling a man out of a building — got the I.R.S. to approve 76 nonprofits, often despite glaring red flags of potential fraud. His operations stole the names of better-known charities. They claimed to be located where they obviously were not.

But the I.R.S. kept saying yes. And in doing so, the agency has attracted scrutiny of its new fast-track system for approving charities — an innovation implemented to deal with backlogs and budget cuts that now denies only one application in 2,400, according to agency statistics.

“Nobody’s watching the store,” said Nina E. Olson, who was the I.R.S.’s in-house national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019 and warned repeatedly about the decreased level of vetting. “They’re the gatekeeper to this whole universe of charitable subsidies. And if the I.R.S. is not doing its job as a gatekeeper, then you’ve got real problems.”

The agency declined to answer questions about Mr. Hosang’s case, citing taxpayer privacy laws. It also declined to make officials available for in-person interviews, but it released a written statement saying that the fast-track approval system “continues to reduce taxpayer burden and increase cost effectiveness of I.R.S. operations.”

Mr. Hosang was indicted in Brooklyn in May on charges of grand larceny, identity theft and conducting a scheme to defraud. He has pleaded not guilty. The Brooklyn district attorney said he stole about $152,000 in donations that flowed through 23 of his nonprofits. Mr. Hosang did not need to do much to promote the groups; the money came in through online giving platforms that let users choose among I.R.S.-approved charities.

Mr. Hosang, prosecutors said, spent the money on mortgage payments, credit card bills and at liquor stores.

“I did very wrong. I know that,” Mr. Hosang said in an emotional interview with The New York Times at his home on Staten Island. His voice breaking, Mr. Hosang said he had changed his life after a near-death spike in blood sugar in 2020, which he took as a sign from God. He said he wanted to make restitution for what he had done.

But, Mr. Hosang pointed out, every one of his charities had been approved.

“If you file something with an agency,” he said, “and they approve it, do you think it’s illegal?”

Mr. Hosang was born in Trinidad, grew up in Brooklyn, and graduated from New York University in 1984 with a degree in finance. He wound up on the ugly side of Wall Street — accused of running “pump and dump” operations that conned customers into paying high prices for low-quality stocks.

Prosecutors later said Mr. Hosang and his associates recruited salesmen on the subway, rewarded them with marijuana and worked with an associate of the Gambino crime family. Once, when a rival visited to complain, investigators said, Mr. Hosang and the mob associate “dangled him out the window of the ninth-floor office.”

In 1997, he was barred from the industry by a self-regulatory body then called the National Association of Securities Dealers.

In 1999, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of fraud and money laundering. Mr. Hosang’s attorney, Yusuf El Ashmawy, said Mr. Hosang cooperated with authorities and helped convict 150 people. He spent about two years in federal prison, according to federal records.

After his release, Mr. Hosang focused on a new business. In 2014, federal records show, he asked the I.R.S. to approve tax exemption for a new nonprofit: “The American Cancer Society for Children, Inc.” It wasn’t connected to the American Cancer Society.

“I got sidetracked. My son passed away,” Mr. Hosang said in the interview at his home, explaining how he had turned to setting up charities. “It was not a stable mind at the time.”

He began running the operation at a time when the agency was already ill prepared to detect signs of fraud in new applicants.

The first problem, according to former I.R.S. officials: Tax law does not prohibit nonprofits from impersonating better-known nonprofits by using sound-alike names. The second: There are no systematic checks for a history of fraud.

“You could be Jesse James or John Dillinger,” said Marcus S. Owens, who headed the agency’s tax-exempt section until 2000 and now represents charities at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “There’s nothing that says you can’t apply for tax-exempt status from a jail cell, having been convicted of charity fraud.”

Still, former officials said, the I.R.S. bureaucracy once offered a powerful weapon against potential fraudsters.

Examiners who suspected fraud could slow down applications by asking for financial records, plans for the future or information about their officers. The requests were often a bluff of sorts, intended to deter applicants from proceeding, even though the agency had little power to block them if they pressed ahead.

“Congress hasn’t given the I.R.S. authorization to issue rules to make sure charities are not run by crooks,” Mr. Owens said.

The agency, in its written statement, said that employees reviewing new applications “have been trained to identify fraud.”

Mr. Hosang still got through. Between 2014 and 2018, the agency approved 17 of his applications for groups with “American Cancer Society” in their names, according to I.R.S. records.

That caught the attention of the real American Cancer Society. The group began contacting state attorneys general, who often have the power to shut down fraudulent nonprofits in their jurisdictions. That worked in North Dakota, Washington and California, but the state-by-state approach was slow.

In 2018, the American Cancer Society decided it needed a national approach. It wrote to the I.R.S., laying out the pattern it had identified in Mr. Hosang’s groups.

“It feels a little like ‘Scooby Doo,’” said Meghan Biss, a former I.R.S. lawyer who represented the American Cancer Society. “It shouldn’t have been that hard to figure out who the bad guy was.”

“Using the exact same mailing address? ‘I am the American Cancer Society of, like, 19 different cities?’ she said, adding, “That didn’t raise flags to anyone?”

American Cancer Society officials said they never heard back from the I.R.S.

But then, in 2020, the agency approved four new groups connected to Mr. Hosang: The “American Cancer Society” of Michigan. And of Detroit. And of Green Bay. And of Cleveland. Same Staten Island mailbox.

“Sometimes you can get away with things,” Ms. Biss said. “Not because you were so smart but because the people who were supposed to be watching out were not.”

As it turned out, Mr. Hosang had switched to using a new I.R.S. process for smaller charities. The new program was established in 2014, in response to budget cuts and a scandal in which the agency was accused of targeting conservative groups for undue scrutiny.

The new “EZ” application stripped 11 pages of questions down to three, nine boxes to check and a small blank for groups to describe their mission. There was little room for I.R.S. officials to mire suspected scammers in bureaucracy. The denial rate for new charities — which had been as high as one in 53 applicants in the old system — fell to one in 2,400 in this one.

One 2019 study by the agency’s taxpayer advocate found that 46 percent of the applicants it approved were not actually qualified, usually because their charters did not conform to charity law. It also noted that the “mission statements” were often so vague as to be useless. In 2021, federal records show, the I.R.S. approved groups whose mission statements were, in their entirety, “CHARITABLE ACTIVITY,” “NON-PROFIT” and “Need to fill in” (possibly a forgotten note to self).

Mr. Hosang switched to the fast-track system in 2019, according to agency records. His mailbox on Staten Island was the same. The red flags were still red: Among the “directors” listed in these supposed charities, there was a long-dead classmate from N.Y.U., a long-estranged friend from Wall Street, and at least one person who appeared to be imaginary, living on a street in Brooklyn that does not exist.

But, despite the American Cancer Society’s warning, Mr. Hosang was even more successful than before: In two years of using the fast-track system, Mr. Hosang got the I.R.S. to approve 56 new charities.

Zachary Weinsteiger, at the nonprofit-rating group Charity Navigator, said his group’s analysts had noticed the pattern in the I.R.S.’s data — and said it became almost comic, like a single miscreant fooling the same border guards with bad disguises.

“One guy coming in, in a bunch of dollar-store costume pieces,” Mr. Weinsteiger said. “He keeps crossing the border, and everyone keeps thinking he’s a different person.”

But Mr. Weinsteiger said Mr. Hosang’s success highlighted an unsettling problem. The entire regulatory system for U.S. charities rests on the I.R.S.’s vetting process. Its approval signals to state governments and potential donors that a charity is legitimate. It signals to internet giving platforms that a charity is worth including.

“It would be very expensive to do background checks on all the charities the I.R.S. has already approved,” since there are 1.4 million of them, said Ted Hart, chief executive of Charities Aid Foundation America, one of several online giving platforms that allowed donors to give to Mr. Hosang’s groups after they were approved. Mr. Hosang stole more than $3,000 through their platform, according to the indictment in May.

“We need to be able to trust this list” of charities approved by the I.R.S., Mr. Hart said, or donors will be misled again.

When the fast-track process was created, the agency said it would free up personnel to examine existing nonprofits. Instead, as the service’s manpower has shrunk, those examinations have declined by 45 percent since 2013, according to I.R.S. figures.

State charity regulators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to ban charities from impersonating better-known groups. In Congress, Representatives Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, and Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, have introduced a bill that scraps the “EZ” form and fast-track system entirely.

“This form is doing damage,” said Ben Kershaw of Independent Sector, a nonprofit association that supports the bill. “It needs to be stopped now.”

In New York, Mr. Hosang’s lawyer said he is in plea negotiations with prosecutors and “intends to make full restitution.”

“He’s in no shape to go to jail,” Mr. El Ashmawy said. “He’s hurt by this.”

KOROPY, Ukraine — Four men tugged at long strips of fabric to lift a coffin out of the gaping hole in the backyard of a small house. They flung the lid open to reveal the moldy corpse of Oleksiy Ketler, who had been killed instantly by shrapnel when a mortar fell on the road in Koropy, a village outside Khavkiv in northeastern Ukraine, in March.

Mr. Ketler, a father of two young children, would have celebrated his 33rd birthday on June 25, if he had not been outside his house at the wrong time. Now, his body has become another exhibit in Ukraine’s wide-ranging effort to collect evidence to prosecute Russia and its military for war crimes in the brutal killings of Ukrainian civilians.

Experts say the process is proceeding with extraordinary speed and may become the biggest effort in history to hold war criminals to account. But it faces an array of formidable challenges.

For one, the investigations are being undertaken even as the war rages in the east. As the investigators examined Mr. Ketler’s body, the booms of incoming and outgoing shelling thundered nearby. Ukrainian helicopters, most likely bringing new troops to the front line, flew low overhead.

​Also, although investigators from inside and outside Ukraine are all collecting evidence, there is little coordination. And despite the influx of experts, “there are really not enough people” to investigate, indict and judge the cases, said Andrey Kravchenko, the region’s deputy prosecutor, who was sitting in his office in downtown Kharkiv as the sound of outgoing shelling seemed to grow closer.

One building that prosecutors had been using as an office was struck by missiles in what Mr. Kravchenko believed was an intentional attack, and now his team changes its headquarters often.

Demand for accountability is strong.

Ukraine’s judicial system is now almost wholly devoted to investigating war crimes, with most of its 8,300 prosecutors fanned out across the country collecting evidence, said Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine’s chief war crimes prosecutor.

Ukrainian courts have already handed down six guilty sentences to Russian soldiers. Ukraine’s top prosecutor said this past week that almost 20,000 more cases — involving accusations of torture, rape, execution-style killings and the deportation of what Mr. Belousov said could be tens of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia — were being investigated.

At the same time, hundreds of international experts, investigators and prosecutors have descended on Ukraine from an alphabet soup of international agencies.

Early in the war, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, arrived in Ukraine with several dozen investigators. But the court, which is based in the Netherlands, tries a limited number of cases, and usually seeks to prosecute only the upper echelon of political and military leaders.

It is also slow: Investigators working on the 2008 Russian-Georgian war did not apply for arrest warrants until this year.

There are a number of other initiatives, too. Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer, is part of a team advising the Ukrainian government on bringing international legal action against Russia. The United Nations has started a commission to investigate human rights violations in Ukraine — with three human rights experts — but cannot establish a formal tribunal because Russia wields veto power on the U.N. Security Council.

Investigators in Poland are collecting testimonies from refugees who fled there to feed to Ukrainian prosecutors. France has sent mobile DNA analysis teams to embed with the Ukrainian authorities to collect evidence. Nongovernmental organizations based in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, are going to territories recently occupied by Russian soldiers to collect witness statements.

The involvement of multiple countries and organizations does not necessarily lead to a more productive investigation, said Wayne Jordash, a British criminal lawyer who lives in Ukraine. Mr. Jordash, who is part of an international task force supporting Ukrainian prosecutors, was critical of some of the efforts to assist Ukraine judicially, describing it as “smoke and mirrors,” without results and clear priorities.

The International Criminal Court’s investigators were only just getting going, he noted, and experts from other countries have also been cycling in for stints of several weeks.

“You can’t just parachute into an investigation for two weeks and expect it to be meaningful,” Mr. Jordash said.

Iva Vukusic, a scholar of post-conflict justice at the University of Utrecht, said, “Resources are being poured in, but maybe down the line we will see that they were not being spent the right way,” for instance, duplicating investigation efforts rather than providing psychosocial support to victims.

Ms. Vukusic pointed out the large size of the endeavor. Across the country, she said, “there are thousands of potential suspects, and thousands of potential trials.” All of the material needs to be properly marshaled and analyzed, she said.

“If you have 100,000 items — videos, statements, documents — if you don’t know what you’re sitting on, it limits the use of material,” Ms. Vukusic said.

She also cautioned that the International Criminal Court’s leadership could face criticism by collaborating too closely with the Ukrainian authorities because, she said, Ukraine was also “an actor in this war.”

She feared Ukrainian officials were setting expectations for justice very high, and possibly wasting scarce resources on absentia trials.

“No big case is going to be finished in two years or five years because of the scale of the violence and the fact it is going on for so long,” she said.

Mr. Belousov, the Ukrainian war crimes prosecutor, acknowledged as much. “We are playing a long game,” he said. Even if the perpetrator is tried and convicted in absentia, Mr. Belousov said, “We understand in a year, or two or three or five, these guys won’t be able to avoid punishment.”

Mr. Belousov said that he appreciated the international assistance but that coordinating it was the “biggest challenge” law enforcement authorities experienced.

For example, the Kharkiv prosecutors used a shiny new forensic investigation kit donated by the European Union for their exhumation in Koropy, the village in northeast Ukraine. But a police officer from a unit in Dmytrivka, a 45-minute drive west of Kyiv, said they had not seen or met with any international investigators or received any equipment from them.

Mr. Belousov said Ukraine wanted to take the lead in prosecuting the cases — a divergence from previous post-conflict situations in which the national authorities initially left the process to international tribunals.

But most Ukrainian investigators have little experience in these kinds of inquiries.

For example, Andriy Andriychuk, who joined the police force in the region west of Kyiv two years ago, said his work previously involved investigating local disputes or livestock theft. Now it involves “a lot more corpses,” he said.

On a recent sunny afternoon, he was called to a wooded area near the town of Dmytrivka. Several days before, police officers had received a call from foresters who had come upon a man’s grave. The dead man, Mykola Medvid, 56, had been buried with his passport; his hat was hung on top of a cross made out of sticks.

His daughter and his cousin identified his body. The local morgue officially established the cause of death: a fatal shot in the chest.

Since then, his daughter Mariia Tremalo has not heard from the investigators. No witnesses have come forward, and it was unclear who might have killed her father, or why. Still, she is hungry for justice.

“My father will never be returned,” she said. “But I would like the perpetrators to be punished.”

Right now that seems all but impossible.

In Koropy, the village near Kharkiv, Mr. Ketler’s mother, Nadezhda Ketler, was inconsolable as the gravediggers and inspectors worked. She wandered down the road to another part of her property. Six officials stood over her son’s body, photographing and documenting as his best friend, Mykhailo Mykhailenko, who looked petrified and smelled of stale alcohol, identified him.

The next day, Mr. Ketler’s body was taken to the city’s morgue, where the final cause of death was established.

Eventually, Ms. Ketler gathered the strength to show investigators the crater made by the bomb that killed him, leading the police to the exact spot where he died. Ms. Ketler stood looking at the trees as they rustled in the wind. She did not speak to anyone. She said she did not know if a guilty verdict in a war crimes trial, if it ever came, would ease the pain of losing her child.

“I had to bury my son twice,” Ms. Ketler said later. “You understand, this is hard enough to do once, and to have to do it a second time. The pain of a mother will not go anywhere.”

Evelina Riabenko, Diana Poladova and Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — When I accepted a job to teach literature and writing at Vassar College in the summer of 2005, a colleague told me that Poughkeepsie — lesser known to some as the Queen City of the Hudson — was a city caught in post-industrial decline. I had a vague notion of what that looked like: boarded up homes and offices, the husk of dead factories with broken windows and overgrown grass, rusted cars, businesses gone to seed.

I had good reason to think that. At the turn of the 19th century, factories here produced glass, beer, natural wood dyes, clothing, furniture and more. During the Second World War, the Poughkeepsie IBM plant — one of the company’s largest and most historically important manufacturing sites — was awarded a contract to produce munitions. In the years after the war, the company shifted its attention to typewriters, among other things, and then computers. As the region’s main employer up until they pulled out in the 1980s, the plant was the backbone of the city’s economy.

But in the decades that followed, local manufacturing moved elsewhere. By the 1990s, the city struggled to find its economic foothold. But that is changing. Today the local economy is built around service industries like health care, education and tourism.

Missing from the Poughkeepsie of my imagination were the people that called the city home. Long before the factories and the academics settled here, the Wappinger people, who lived along the east bank of the Hudson River from Manhattan Island to the Connecticut River Valley, called this area home. The word Poughkeepsie comes from the Wappinger word U-puku-ipi-sing, which means “reed-covered lodge by the little water place.”

Those of us whose lives are centered around campus often have little interaction with the city, but outside that academic bubble lies a diverse community. I catch glimpses of it during my son’s indoor soccer matches during the winter. And when the snow gives way to the dog days of summer, many locals find some relief at the swimming hole on Wappinger Creek.

To reach the water, you must jump over a metal fence and walk down a narrow trail through the dense vegetation. The stream is divided by a large mound of earth where grass and trees grow; from one hangs a rope that people use to swing into the water.

In May, I returned to my hometown, Patna, India. My trip coincided with the Hindu festival Akshaya Tritiya, when, legend has it, the holy river Ganga descended from the heavens to earth. It was also Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the monthlong dawn-to-sunset fasting of Ramadan.

On the promenade beside the Ganges, I watched young Muslim men dressed in bright kurtas move through the crowd of students sitting on the steps and girls taking selfies at the water’s edge. Even though the groups didn’t mix, I was struck that the wide promenade made it possible for there to be a shared display of difference. At that moment I was transported back to Wappinger Creek, where people of different skin colors share space, in some cases their limbs entangled.

Widening income inequality, religious or ethnic tensions and a punishing pandemic have pushed so many of us to the brink. Yet I can’t help but feel that if there are public spaces where crowds of different kinds can freely gather, there is still hope for democracy.

No “closed” signs, no abandoned buildings, no arid talk of post-industrial decline. The creek is flowing but time has stopped still. There is no burden of history here. You are with your friends, afloat in the water. It is not only your body — it appears even your breath is finally weightless.

Caleb Stein is a photographer based in New York. Amitava Kumar teaches at Vassar College and is the author of “A Time Outside This Time.”

TOKYO — To understand how Japan has fared better than most of the world in containing the dire consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, consider Mika Yanagihara, who went shopping for flowers this past week in central Tokyo. Even when walking outside in temperatures in the mid-90s, she kept the lower half of her face fully covered.

“People will stare at you,” Ms. Yanagihara, 33, said, explaining why she didn’t dare take off her mask. “There is that pressure.”

Japan’s Covid death rate, just one-twelfth of that in the United States, is the lowest among the world’s wealthiest nations. With the world’s third-largest economy and 11th-largest populace, Japan also tops global rankings in vaccination and has consistently had one of the globe’s lowest infection rates.

Although no government authority has ever mandated masks or vaccinations or instituted lockdowns or mass surveillance, Japan’s residents have largely evaded the worst ravages of the virus. Instead, in many ways, Japan let peer pressure do a lot of the work.

Even now, as average daily cases have fallen to just 12 per 100,000 residents — about a third of the average in the United States — a government survey in May found that close to 80 percent of people working in offices or enrolled in school wear masks and about 90 percent do so when using public transit. Movie theaters, sports stadiums and shopping malls continue to request that visitors wear masks, and for the most part, people comply. The term “face pants” has become a buzzword, implying that dropping a mask would be as embarrassing as taking off one’s underwear in public.

Many factors have undoubtedly contributed to Japan’s coronavirus outcomes, including a nationalized health care system and severe border controls that have outlasted those in many other countries.

But social conformity — and a fear of public shaming that is instilled from the youngest ages — has been a key ingredient in Japan’s relative success in Covid prevention, experts say. Unlike in many other countries, Japanese law does not permit the government to order lockdowns or vaccinations. The majority of the population followed each other in heeding guidance from scientific experts who encouraged people to wear masks and avoid situations where they would be in enclosed, unventilated areas with large crowds.

After a slow start, once Japan ramped up the distribution of vaccines, most people followed advisories to get them. Even without mandates, close to 90 percent of all people over 65, the most vulnerable population, have received booster shots, compared with 70 percent of seniors in the United States.

In Japan, “if you tell people to look right, they will all look right,” said Kazunari Onishi, an associate professor of public health at St. Luke’s International University in Tokyo.

“Generally, I think that being influenced by others and not thinking for yourself is a bad thing,” Dr. Onishi added. But during the pandemic, he said, “it was a good thing.”

Unlike in the United States, wearing a mask or getting a vaccine never became ideological litmus tests. Although trust in government has fallen during the pandemic, in a country where the same party has governed for all but four years since 1955, the public put pragmatism over politics in the approach to Covid.

Often, people policed each other or businesses seen to be violating municipal requests to close early or stop serving alcohol during periods designated as states of emergency.

“We got so many reports about shops being open that we started joking about the ‘self restraint police,’” said Yuko Hirai, who works in the emergency response department in Osaka, Japan’s third-largest prefecture. “People were definitely aware that society’s eyes were on them.”

The practice of keeping in line with peers is inculcated in schoolchildren, who wear uniforms in most public schools and are shamed into following institutional expectations. “Just being removed from the group is such a big deal for Japanese kids,” said Naomi Aoki, associate professor of public management at the University of Tokyo. “They always want to belong to a social group and don’t want to feel isolated.”

Children are taught to act for the collective benefit. Students clean classroom floors and school grounds and take turns serving lunch in cafeterias.

Japanese culture also depends on an ethic of public self-restraint that can be marshaled into group action. When Emperor Hirohito was dying in 1988, pop singers postponed weddings and schools canceled festivals.

After the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima led to serious power shortages, the public cut back on electricity use voluntarily. (With temperatures rising in Tokyo this past week, residents are being asked to do so again.)

During the pandemic, politicians tapped “into this collective idea of self-restraint for the public good,” said James Wright, an anthropologist at the Alan Turing Institute in London who has studied Japan’s coronavirus response.

With few legal options for enforcing the guidance, authorities hoped the population would voluntarily comply with pleas to stay home, said Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of virology at Tohoku University in northeastern Japan and a government adviser.

Despite Japan’s culture of collectivism, Dr. Oshitani was surprised when businesses quickly closed and people refrained from going out. Companies that had never allowed telecommuting sent employees home with laptops. Families canceled visits to older relatives. Close to 200 industry groups representing theaters, professional sports teams, and venues that hosted weddings and funerals issued lengthy protocols for preventing infections.

The public embraced the guidelines, and the overall death rate actually fell below that of the year immediately preceding the coronavirus outbreak.

Those who tried to buck the guidance were subjected to public condemnation. Toshio Date, who operates a venue in Osaka devoted to the board games Go and shogi, initially tried to stay open when the city requested that restaurants, bars and other entertainment businesses shut down.

When local television stations started asking to film the club as an outlier, Mr. Date, 58, got the message and quickly closed. Even after infections settled down in Osaka, which recorded the highest death rate in Japan, and businesses reopened, he said strangers frequently scolded him for hosting too many customers.

Although the public has provided most of the sticks, the government has offered carrots in the form of economic subsidies for businesses.

In 2020, the country paid out over $40.5 billion to more than 4.2 million small- to medium-size companies and individual business owners, according to statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Larger businesses received “cooperation money” based on their pre-pandemic revenue, as much as 200,000 yen — just under $1,500 — a day.

The incentives were not universally effective. In the first summer of the pandemic, clusters of infections began appearing in nightlife districts in central Tokyo, as visitors to bars and cabarets ignored the experts’ advice.

When businesses flouted guidance on ventilation, masking and alcohol sanitizing, city officials were dispatched to convince them to fall in line. Only as a last resort were businesses fined or cut off from economic subsidies. In Tokyo, according to the city’s Bureau of Industrial and Labor Affairs, between 96 and 98 percent of businesses ultimately agreed to follow the rules.

Experts warn that voluntary compliance is no guarantee of indefinite success.

“The response is like an Othello game,” said Dr. Oshitani, comparing Japan’s coronavirus results to the board game where one move can change a winning outcome to a losing one. “All of a sudden, the most successful countries can become the worst country in the world,” he said.

For now, residents continue to bow to peer pressure.

Kae Kobe, 40, a receptionist at an office in Shibuya, said that because her job is client facing, she always wears her mask at work.

“Everyone around is still wearing it,” she said. “So it’s hard to get rid of it.”

Hisako Ueno and Hikari Hida contributed reporting.

Travelers across the country faced the prospect of canceled or delayed flights on Saturday as airlines and airports dealt with a combination of high demand, bad weather and staffing shortages.

As of late Saturday afternoon, more than 600 flights in the United States had been canceled and nearly 4,400 flights within, into or out of the country had been delayed, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.

While the number of problem flights was higher than on a typical travel day, travel demand was also higher. According to the Transportation Security Administration, the number of travelers over the Fourth of July holiday weekend had reached prepandemic levels. Travel demand over the same holiday weekend last year had substantially recovered from pandemic lows but was still below this year’s levels.

FlightAware data showed that the three airports in the United States most affected by cancellations and delays on Saturday were Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina.

The number of canceled and delayed flights was far below the levels over this past Christmas and New Year’s holidays, when bad weather and Omicron-related staff shortages wreaked havoc with airline schedules.

Still, the airlines are scrambling to keep up with demand this July 4 holiday, as they struggle with a pilot shortage, weather conditions and air traffic control delays.

“Delta teams continue to safely manage through the compounding factors of inclement weather and air traffic control delays, which impact available flight crew duty time,” a Delta Air Lines spokesman said in an email. “Canceling a flight is always our last resort, and we sincerely apologize to our customers for any disruption to their travel plans.”

Delta said it was offering customers the ability to reschedule flights from July 1 through July 4 with no fare change if they are traveling between the same origin and destination.

United Airlines also blamed weather and air traffic control programs for its delays.

Adding to the stress at American Airlines was a computer glitch in its pilot trip trading system that, the airline said, allowed some trip trading that “shouldn’t have been permitted.” But American said it did not “anticipate any operational impact because of this issue” and added that the “primary drivers of delays/cancellations” on Saturday were “weather and traffic control issues.”

The Federal Aviation Administration said the top cause of the flight delays and cancellations was weather conditions followed by travel demand. The agency added in a statement: “The F.A.A. has acted on the issues raised by airlines, and is working with them to share information to keep aircraft moving safely when weather and other airspace events constrain capacity. The agency also has added alternate routes and placed more controllers in high demand areas, and increased data sharing.”