The first US Peace Corps volunteers return to El Salvador since leaving in 2016 because of violence

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge on Friday denied Gov. Kathy Hochul’s request to toss out lawsuits challenging her decision to halt a new congestion fee for drivers into Manhattan.

Judge Arthur Engoron made the decision in a Manhattan court after hearing about two hours of arguments in lawsuits brought by transportation and environmental advocates that support the fee.

The tolling program, which had been set to start June 30, would have imposed on drivers entering the core of Manhattan a toll of about $15, depending on vehicle type, in order to generate about $1 billion annually for transit improvements.

Andrew Celli, a lawyer representing the City Club of New York, one of the local groups that has sued Hochul, said afterward that the judge’s ruling means the lawsuits will move forward and the governor will have to justify her actions in court.

“What the judge did here is he said that congestion pricing will not be delayed by legal technicalities,” he said outside court. “That’s a huge victory for people that care about the law and people that care about congestion pricing.”

John Lindsay, a spokesperson for Hochul, declined to comment on the decision but said in a statement late Friday that the governor “like the majority of New Yorkers” still “believes this is not the right time to implement congestion pricing.”

Groups challenging the governor’s decision, including the Riders Alliance, the Sierra Club and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, argue the Democrat violated the state’s laws and constitution when she indefinitely paused the fee just days before its planned launch.

Hochul at the time cited economic concerns, suggesting it wasn’t the right time to impose a new toll scheme as local businesses and residents were still recovering financially from the coronavirus pandemic.

In court Friday, Celli argued that state lawmakers deliberately did not give the governor’s office authority on when the fee would be imposed when it passed it into law in 2019.

Instead, he argued, the legislature charged the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which oversees the bridges and tunnels in the New York City area, with making that final decision in order to remove politics from the equation.

“She doesn’t have the discretion,” Celli said.

But Alan Schoenfeld, a lawyer representing Hochul and the state Department of Transportation in the lawsuits, said it was a “demonstrably false” to suggest that state lawmakers intended to put the tunnel and bridge authority “unilaterally” in charge of congestion pricing.

He argued that the law also recognizes the critical role the governor’s office and state DOT play in the process.

Engoron, at points in the hearing, appeared unmoved by Schoenfeld’s arguments.

He also joked at the outset of the hearing that he drove into Manhattan for the hearing and the traffic was “terrible.”

“Can’t anyone do something about that?” Engoron said to laughs before launching into the proceedings.

Dror Ladin, a lawyer with Earthjustice, which represented some of the groups challenging Hochul, also argued that the months since the governor’s decision this summer have been damaging.

He says New Yorkers have dealt with more traffic, more negative health and environmental consequences from air pollution and further delays in desperately needed transit system upgrades.

“There’s a real harm here,” Ladin said.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

PARIS (AP) — Loewe’s latest VIP-filled collection dazzled at the Paris Fashion Week runway Friday, presenting an explosion of flowers and form that captured designer Jonathan Anderson’s innovative spirit.

The Northern Irish designer again showed his talent for infusing theatricality into his designs, showcasing whimsical creations like a surreal giant hoop skirt that lent the display an eccentric, circus-like feel. A stunning white gown adorned with vibrant floral prints radiated energy.

Here are some highlights of spring-summer ready-to-wear shows:

Loewe’s twists

Unexpected lines and twists on classic silhouettes dominated the runway, with the giant hoop transforming floral patterns into eccentric spectacles. Anderson expertly wove together historical inspirations from the Renaissance with the carefree looseness of the 1920s, mixed with surreal structured skirts and peplums that evoked a rich sense of heritage. All designs had something off-kilter about them.

A standout piece, a beautiful feathered poncho featuring a Van Gogh print, dazzled with its artistic flair. It illustrated Anderson’s ability to transform art into fashion and resonated deeply with camera-ready audiences. Each piece seemed to challenge the viewer’s expectations, daring them to reconsider the boundaries of traditional fashion.

In its exploration of bold concepts and mind-bending forms, the display occasionally veered into the overly conceptual. But Anderson still delivered a wealth of wearable pieces. The collection included striking items like a black trench coat with a fashion-forward midriff cut-out, which exuded rock-star magnetism and exemplified the brand’s leather heritage.

The piece, along with others, showcased Anderson’s mastery in balancing creativity with practicality.

Schiaparelli shines with bold whimsy

Daniel Roseberry’s latest collection for Schiaparelli focuses on blending high fashion with refreshing accessibility. Though it featured less of the Surrealism associated with the late, great house founder Elsa Schiaparelli, the collection still celebrated whimsy, albeit a dialed down version.

Gone are the days of celebrity-driven runways. Instead, Roseberry crafted an eclectic mix of bold silhouettes and playful designs. Standout pieces included denim with a unique U-shaped dip at the waist, paired with curve-hugging ivory bodysuits that highlighted an hourglass shape. This motif, evident in a zip-front dress and sleek halter top, appeared throughout the collection, showcasing Roseberry’s knack for redefining femininity.

With fewer embroideries this season, the designer emphasized texture and details. Models strutted in gathered mesh jersey dresses, with fabric coiled like a braid, and dresses accented with suede for added luster.

Footwear also stole the spotlight, featuring Roseberry’s signature trompe l’oeil sneakers alongside leather babouche slides adorned with golden toe rings — transforming everyday items into artistic statements.

Roseberry drew inspiration from the women in his life who crave statement pieces that are effortlessly chic, with daring patterns, exaggerated shoulder pads, and bold floral motifs.

In a fashion landscape often driven by commercial pressures, Schiaparelli’s latest show carved out a dynamic space for creativity. Roseberry proved he can balance artistic whimsy with wearable elegance.

Issey Miyake’s papery beauty

Issey Miyake’s latest collection unfolded like a poetic exploration into the art of simplicity and craft. Much like the house’s previous offerings, this collection combined innovative techniques with tradition — a hallmark that has continued under the vision of Satoshi Kondo and the design atelier.

This time, the team explored paper as a medium and inspiration, delving into its textures, lightness, and nostalgic feel. If previous shows dabbled in geometry and fluidity, Friday’s collection was about the fragility and strength of paper through airy, pleated garments and origami-inspired folds.

The collection began with kamiko pieces — garments made of traditional washi paper — that paid homage to Japan’s centuries-old crafts. This nod to the past didn’t come at the expense of wearability.

The Fold-to-Form pieces were nothing short of architectural brilliance, with angular, origami-inspired folds. It felt like a natural extension of the Miyake legacy: one part innovation, one part reflection on the past.

The house’s fixation on textiles sometimes tipped into over-conceptualization. The EAU series, with its water-like transparency and fluidity, had all the ethereal beauty one could expect, but the weight of its metaphor — garments flowing like water — felt familiar.

Marketing madness

As Paris Fashion Week unfolds, so too do the latest gimmicks. The newest trend and subject of front-row chatter was the introduction of Uber Fashion cars, designed in collaboration with fashion house Coperni. The vehicles feature a metallic sheen inspired by the brand’s Swipe Bag.

Fashion-conscious riders could book a free ride in these cars by selecting the Uber Fashion option in the app, and each ride even comes with a custom playlist to enhance the Fashion Week experience, according to Uber. However, availability is on a first-come, first-served basis, meaning that many may be unable to secure a ride amidst the event’s chaos. It’s yet another example of how the fashion industry seeks to capitalize on Fashion Week’s excitement.

Victoria Beckham blows in a new breeze

Victoria Beckham’s latest collection swept through Paris with the force of a Greek myth, evoking the Victory of Samothrace as a twisted cropped vest opened the show. It billowed like a gleaming shard of fabric, as if it were poised to take flight off the runway — setting the tone for a collection that danced between poetry and practicality.

The windswept aesthetic was unmistakable throughout, from a sheer pastel top that exposed nipples in a diagonal cascade down the torso, to loose-waisted signature trousers with a billowing slit. Beckham’s recurring play with proportions was here, albeit with a softer, more sculptural touch, subtly nodding to her signature focus on elongating the body. This time, her references to Ancient Greece gave her collection a new kind of dynamism that felt almost ethereal. Gigi Hadid, draped in a gleaming green gown with a gathered skirt, moved like a sculpture come to life — a striking moment that embodied this unexpected, but highly welcome, more poetical direction for the former Spice Girl.

But amid the billowing silhouettes and minimalism, Beckham deftly anchored designs with the staples that have made her brand so popular. Florals made an appearance — subtle, yet essential — as did her commitment to relaxed, modern tailoring. While the poetical gestures floated through, the bread-and-butter of the house remained: practical, wearable luxury.

Yet the collection walked a fine line between creativity and wearability — a line Beckham has navigated with mixed success in the past. While the draped, windswept garments invoked a sense of playful experimentation, critics of her previous work may wonder if her eccentricity is in danger of overpowering the brand’s practical core. Beckham’s last few seasons have seen her balancing the theatrical with the everyday, but the sheer pastels and sculptural gowns here flirted with pushing that envelope a little too far.

Still, Beckham has proven her command of deconstruction and silhouette, and here it paid off. The architectural approach she’s honed, from slashed jackets to exposed backs, found new life in this Grecian motif. Her ability to expose and conceal in the same breath, to deconstruct and rebuild, once again highlights her strength in mastering complex garment construction—a talent honed across her Parisian shows.

NEW YORK (AP) — The eclectic annual Fall for Dance festival is a beloved tradition among dance fans, not least for its $30 tickets — still quite a deal in New York, even if they began at $10 two decades ago.

But the best thing about it is still the variety it brings to the stage, with 15 acts over 11 days this year from artists around the world. This year’s highlights have come from as far as the Kyiv Opera House in Ukraine, and as close as a few blocks away.

You could call it a veritable United Nations of dance — which is exactly how the president of New York City Center, Michael Rosenberg, described it this week, introducing the third of five programs. He didn’t explicitly refer to the ongoing U.N General Assembly happening a bit further east, wreaking its usual traffic chaos.

There was a happier chaos happening onstage, a mishmash of extremely different styles of dance. As usual, the audience seemed to love it all — especially the more out-there elements, like dancers stalking the stage on stilts in the first program, courtesy of choreographer Andrea Miller and her Brooklyn-based Gallim company.

Fall for Dance has always lured a mix of known names — some of them trying out something new – with names unknown to most of the crowd. Among the familiar faces this year so far have been much-loved ballet stars Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet and Herman Cornejo of American Ballet Theatre, both choreographing this time (with Cornejo dancing, too).

The emotional highlight, though, was the two-night appearance of the National Ballet of Ukraine, a troupe that has managed to remain operating in Kyiv despite huge hardship. In its first New York performance in decades, the company opened the festival with “Wartime Elegy,” an evocative piece by one of the world’s leading choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky.

Currently an artist in residence at New York City Ballet, Ratmansky has a deep connection to the material. Born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, he grew up in Kyiv. When he premiered “Wartime Elegy” at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle in 2022, he unfurled and held aloft a Ukrainian flag during curtain calls. In program notes for Fall for Dance, he joins the dancers in honoring their colleagues who have fallen in warfare.

The piece, featuring four male and four female dancers, both began and ended on somber tones. But in the middle, men who’d been dressed in black suddenly appeared in folk costumes. The moody (and gorgeous) piano and strings music by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov shifted to spirited tunes, and the men leaped into folk-style dancing with abandon.

The audience laughed along. But soon the dancers’ bodies seemed to be collapsing, as the choreography again reflected pain, not joy. The curtain closed with one woman standing in arabesque, leg raised behind her, as if to say, quite like the troupe itself, that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Peck, who has been starting to build an impressive choreographic resume as she continues to lead NYCB as one of its top ballerinas, presented one of three pieces commissioned by the festival: “Piano Songs,” a spirited solo for ABT dancer Aaron Bell, to the music of Meredith Monk. The 81-year-old composer delighted the crowd by appearing for a curtain call.

The highlight of another program was “The Specter of the Rose, by Cornejo, the Argentine dancer who recently celebrated his 25th anniversary with ABT. It was a reimagining of the short Fokine ballet about a young girl who returns from a ball in her gown and dreams of the spirit of the rose, who materializes to dance with her. Here, it was modernized, with Cornejo bare-chested and in jeans, and his partner, sprite-like ABT ballerina Skylar Brandt, in little jean shorts.

The dancing was everything you’d hope from two classical dancers at the top of their game, with Cornejo showing that the years have not diminished his high-flying leaps and turns — even in denim.

The festival continues through Sunday.

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