Author: NY TIMES

Amazon said on Sunday that its Prime Video streaming service would release a “behind the scenes” documentary about Melania Trump’s life.The film will head to movie theaters and stream on Amazon Prime in the second half of this year, the company said in a statement. Mrs. Trump will be an executive producer of the documentary, which started filming in December, the month after her husband, Donald J. Trump, won the presidential election.Amazon said it was “excited to share this truly unique story.”The company and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, had a rocky relationship with Mr.…

Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over…

Snakes like these are giants. Black mambas can stretch to 14 feet, and the longest king cobra ever recorded was 19 feet.Puff adders are petite by contrast, as short as six inches and no longer than six feet, but very thick. They have long, retractable fangs that can deliver poison into muscle.Their venom destroys blood-clotting factors, and victims die slow, gruesome deaths, bleeding in the brain, eyes and mouth.Identifying the attacker can help tailor treatment. But many people never see the snake that bites them or, if they do, cannot identify it. To the untrained eye, venomous snakes may look…

Before Jasmine Ariel Bolton and Junior John West went on their first date on April 18, 2021, a month after being matched on Hinge, they were confident that they were a good match.For their first date, Dr. West invited Ms. Bolton to join him in one of his favorite pastimes. “I had said on my Hinge profile that I loved going to farmers’ markets, which Jasmine seemed intrigued by, and I suggested we hit the one on Sunday morning at Dupont Circle,” he said.At the time, Dr. West, 34, was living in Baltimore and a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns…

Near the time of his achievement in the Met’s “Ring,” in which he managed to invest the faceless staging with vividness, he began little by little to curtail his opera engagements, particularly productions in the United States that sent him away from home in Wales for long stretches. This cleared time for more concerts, and special projects like a semi-staged “Sweeney Todd” alongside Emma Thompson that originated with the New York Philharmonic in 2014, then traveled to London.Terfel was set to come back to the Met as Scarpia when its ornate current “Tosca” production, directed by David McVicar, opened in…

Syria’s main airport handled its first international flights on Tuesday since the fall of the government of former President Bashar al-Assad last month, as the new leaders press to reassert a semblance of normalcy in the war-weary country.One Qatar Airways plane landed following a direct flight from Doha to the Syrian capital, Damascus. Jordan’s Civil Aviation Authority announced that it had also sent an initial flight to Damascus on Tuesday morning as a “message of support” to its northern neighbor, the first trip there by its national carrier in 13 years.Another flight affiliated with Syria’s national carrier took off on…

Dozens of people were killed and hundreds of buildings were toppled after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck a region near one of Tibet’s holiest cities, close to the Himalayan border with Nepal on Tuesday. Tremors were felt in Nepal.The quake struck shortly after 9 a.m. at a depth of 6.2 miles in Dingri County in Tibet, Chinese state media reported. They said at least 95 people had died and 130 were injured. Xinhua, the official news agency, published video of police removing rubble and lifting debris.China’s state broadcaster reported that more than 1,000 houses had collapsed in Dingri County, which sits…

Taiwan is investigating whether a ship linked to China is responsible for damaging one of the undersea cables that connects Taiwan to the internet, the latest reminder of how vulnerable Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is to damage from China.The incident comes as anxiety in Europe has risen over apparent acts of sabotage, including ones aimed at such undersea communication cables. Two fiber-optic cables under the Baltic Sea were severed in November, prompting officials from Sweden, Finland and Lithuania to halt a Chinese-flagged commercial ship in the area for weeks over its possible involvement.In Taiwan, communications were quickly rerouted after the damage…

In recent years, Mr. White and Mr. Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, have bonded over their passion for professional fighting, including mixed martial arts, which Mr. Zuckerberg took up in 2022.“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in his post. “I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.”In 2023, Mr. White attempted to broker a cage match between Mr. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X,…

Reports of a surge in cases of a respiratory virus in China have evoked dark echoes of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic almost exactly five years ago.But despite the surface similarities, this situation is very different, and far less worrisome, medical experts say.The Chinese cases are reported to be infections with human metapneumovirus, known to doctors as HMPV. Here is what we know so far:What is HMPV?It is one of several pathogens that circulate across the world each year, causing respiratory illnesses. HMPV is common — so common that most people will be infected while they are still children…