Author: NY TIMES

For more than a year, millions of Palestinians living in Gaza have been homeless, facing severe food and medical shortages and under enduring threat of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly 46,000 Gazans have been killed, local health officials said on Wednesday, in a landscape largely reduced to rubble.So when President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if hostages taken from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 are not freed in the next two weeks, Gazans were left to wonder: if this is not hell, then what is?“I am not sure he…

After struggling without heat for six days, a breakaway region in the Eastern European country of Moldova is now short of electricity, too, with the authorities ordering eight hours of power cuts a day to prevent the overloaded electricity system from collapsing.The energy crisis in Transnistria, a sliver of pro-Russian territory between Moldova and Ukraine, began on Jan. 1 when Moscow stopped supplying natural gas through a pipeline running across Ukraine. It intensified this week as residents tried to keep warm using electric heaters, overloading and often blowing out an antiquated Soviet-era electricity grid. The power outages have in turn…

Welcome back to Monday Tennis Briefing, where Competitor will explain the story behind the stories in court over the past week.This week, the first tournament of 2025 concluded in Australia and New Zealand. Aryna Sabalenka continues to have a remarkable record and has had too many matches end in retirement.If you’d like to follow our great tennis coverage, click here.How to beat Aryna Sabalenka in Australia?On the surface, there is little hope for others in the field. World No. 1 Sabalenka enters the Australian Open as a two-time defending champion with 27 wins in 28 hard-court Grand Slam matches and…

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…