Author: NY TIMES

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the military must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, a decision that threatened to split Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government amid the war in Gaza.In a unanimous decision, a panel of nine judges held that there was no legal basis for the longstanding military exemption given to ultra-Orthodox religious students. Without a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s mandatory draft laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.In a country where military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women, the…

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, agreed to plead guilty on Monday to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material in exchange for his release from a British prison, ending his long and bitter standoff with the United States.Mr. Assange, 52, was granted his request to appear before a federal judge at one of the more remote outposts of the federal judiciary, the courthouse in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a brief court filing made public late Monday. He is expected to be sentenced to about five years, the equivalent…

If fashion is a storytelling business, it should follow that runway shows are narratives.Yet they can’t be. For starters, they lack a plot. True, designers can be relied upon to spiel about inspirations, travels or philosophies as a listener’s eyeballs roll back in his head. The truth is that most fashion shows are best consumed, as everything else now is, in fragments. They are elements of an ongoing internal scroll, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as Instagram reels.That, anyway, is how this critic began viewing the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that the following is…

In recent years, Hollywood has become much better at hunting pirates. Just last week, five men were convicted of operating Jetflicks, an illegal streaming site that federal prosecutors said offered a stolen lineup of TV shows and movies that was larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon’s Prime Video.But thieves are also getting better, moving operations overseas and taking advantage of the rising popularity of streaming to steal more content.So entertainment companies — already under pressure from Wall Street to improve streaming economics — are intensifying their antipiracy efforts, hiring a former F.B.I. official to lead the…

Deb Schmill has become a fixture on Capitol Hill. Last week alone, she visited the offices of 13 lawmakers, one of more than a dozen trips she has made from her home near Boston over the past two years.In each meeting, Ms. Schmill talks about her daughter Becca, who died in 2020 at age 18. Ms. Schmill said Becca had died after taking fentanyl-laced drugs bought on Facebook. Before that, she said, her daughter was raped by a boy she had met online, then was cyberbullied on Snapchat.“I have to do what I can to help pass legislation to protect…

Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400…

Pervis broke the news of Prince’s death when she arrived to perform at Coachella. She wanted to go home, and cried until her set the next day. She delivered an ebullient monologue onstage, calling him “the most beautiful spirit that I have ever met” before teasing a bit of “Purple Rain,” the crowd clapping the rhythm. “It helped,” she said. “I have had a lot of hard times, good times, but I make it through. Things don’t seem as hard as they used to.”She meant this only for herself. Though many conditions have improved since the days of “Why? (Am…

A strike in the northern Gaza Strip killed a sister of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, and her family on Tuesday, the armed group and a Gazan rescue official said.Hamas confirmed the death of Mr. Haniyeh’s sister, Zaher Haniyeh, in a statement. The Israeli military said it was aware of the reports but could not “currently confirm” that it had struck the Haniyeh family home.Mr. Haniyeh, who heads the Hamas political bureau from exile in Qatar, is a longstanding political leader of the group that governs the Gaza Strip and that launched the deadly Oct. 7 attack on…

Kenya’s lawmakers passed a contentious finance bill on Tuesday even as thousands of demonstrators marched toward Parliament in the capital, Nairobi, hoping to persuade the government to scrap the tax increases that they say will make life onerous for millions of people.The police used tear gas in an attempt to keep the protesters away from the Parliament building, and the sound of live fire rang out. Two wounded people were seen lying on the ground.The debate over the bill has shaken Kenya, an East African economic powerhouse of 54 million people that has long been an anchor of stability in…

The question of inspiration has always been a little cringey when it comes to fashion: Designers offering up “mood board” collages backstage to turn even the genesis of their collections into content and connect them to some deeper meaning that can often seem either ridiculously convoluted or drippingly banal. Hence Miranda Priestley’s famous “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking” moment in “The Devil Wears Prada.”It was a moment that came to mind at the beginning of the Paris couture shows, when guests entered the Dior tent at the Musée Rodin to see the walls covered in 32 mosaic murals of sprinters and…