Author: NY TIMES

As Hurricane Beryl headed toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands early Wednesday as a powerful Category 4 storm, a clearer picture emerged of the devastation it had caused on two small islands in Grenada, with that country’s leader calling the destruction “unimaginable” and “total.”“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” Grenada’s prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, said at a briefing after visiting the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, which were ravaged by Beryl on Monday.Officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on the islands, where about 6,000 people live, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health…

The 2024 WNBA All-Star Game roster has been confirmed, with Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese set to debut at the annual showcase later this month.Clark, the No. 1 pick by the Indiana Heat in this year’s WNBA draft, received the most votes in the fan voting portion. She already won Rookie of the Month in May, leads all first-year players in points (16.2 points per game), assists (6.9 per game) and ranks first in three-pointers made (56). Second in the league.Reese, the Chicago Sky’s seventh overall pick, was named June’s Rookie of the Year on Tuesday. Over the weekend, she…

The trajectory of FX’s “The Bear” has mirrored the fortunes of its characters. Over three seasons, what started as a scrappy half-hour comedy about a band of gritty Chicagoans running a sandwich shop has now become a cultural phenomenon about those same characters running a fancy restaurant — in suits and Thom Browne chef’s whites, no less.The show has always had an elegant, consumer-friendly sheen (see: the internet frenzy over the T-shirts that its star, Jeremy Allen White, wore in the first season). But its cast members are now household names: Mr. White, who plays Carmy, is a Calvin Klein…

V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells opened up a whole new class of drugs and helped save the lives of millions of women, died on June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76.Balkees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Dr. Jordan and was his caregiver for several years, said the cause was renal cancer.Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous, even obsessive researcher, a quality demonstrated in his work on tamoxifen. The drug was first synthesized in 1962, though it was discarded after…

Among fans of canceled animated film projects — and yes, there is such a fandom, and it’s enormous — “Me and My Shadow” is perhaps the most popular cartoon feature that never was.Greenlighted in 2010 by DreamWorks Animation, the film boasted a strong voice cast, including Bill Hader, Kate Hudson and Josh Gad, and a team of some of the industry’s top artists and animators. The filmmakers combined computer-generated and hand-drawn animation to create a lead character whose shadow had a mind and physicality all his own, at a time when few studios, including DreamWorks, were doing hand-drawn at all.“For…

One king has been barricaded in the palace, protected from potential usurpers by hundreds of subjects armed with sticks and machetes.Another king, evicted from the same palace in May, is living in an annex down the road, dispatching lawyers to courthouses in an attempt to regain the throne.The battle unfolding for the emirate of Kano — one of West Africa’s oldest and most revered kingdoms — is not just a struggle for an ancient throne, but also part of a wider contest for control over the most populous state in Africa’s most populous country.The emirs of Kano once had absolute…

This year will be Zoe Oosting’s seventh summer at the Rockbrook Summer Camp for Girls in western North Carolina, where campers, ages 6 to 16, ride horses through the mountains, spin slabs of clay and weave friendship bracelets.This summer, Ms. Oosting’s second as a counselor, she’s observed a new bonding activity: multistep skin care routines.The girls in her cabin, ages 11 to 13, packed their suitcases with Glow Recipe serums, Drunk Elephant jelly cleansers and bottles of Sol de Janeiro body spray.Teenagers have forged friendships over face masks for generations, but with the explosion of a skin-care-obsessed beauty industry, even…

Americans have a growing appetite for avocados, and a single state in Mexico supplies nearly all of the fruit eaten in the United States.This reliance is highlighted when imports are disrupted. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently suspended inspections of avocados and mangoes set to be shipped from Mexico, citing security issues for agency workers stationed in Michoacán, a state in western Mexico where criminal groups have sought to infiltrate the thriving avocado industry.The U.S. ambassador to Mexico said in late June that inspections would “gradually” resume, and visited Michoacán last week to meet with state and federal authorities.Here’s what…

Some of Hollywood’s most durable genre conventions have to do with outsiders and underdogs, often two categories rolled into one, who show up the self-important elites. The cowboy who rolls into town and brings justice in a not-quite-law-abiding way. The lovable con artist who makes a fool of the uppity society folks. The washed-up cop or spy called in for one last covert mission. The stereotypical sorority girl who turns out to be a secret legal genius.That last one is, of course, the “Legally Blonde” heroine Elle Woods, a fashion major who decides on a whim to go to Harvard…

One moment, a crowd of tens of thousands, almost all women, were singing and swaying in devotion to a revered holy man in front of them onstage, all packed under a sprawling tent in northern India.But as the guru left, people began pushing and shoving to get out from the close quarters and still, stifling heat under the pavilion. Some began falling, onto the muddy field underneath or into an adjacent ditch. There was panic and screaming. Bodies piled on top of each other everywhere.By nightfall on Tuesday, the toll of the tragedy in Hathras district, in the state of…