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…

For the last few summers in East Hampton, N.Y., many people have gotten up early in hopes of glimpsing Jay-Z on one of his early morning walks amid the shingled mansions of moguls such as David Zaslav, David Geffen and Ron Perelman.But this season, the world’s most successful rapper has seemingly been upstaged by a new star in town: a wild American flamingo that has drawn hundreds of spectators in recent weeks.It apparently made its way to this moneyed enclave of celebrities, plutocrats and tourists last month, taking up residence in Georgica Pond, a brackish coastal pond that lies between…

One network is in charge of every aspect of the Biden-Trump debate, a major shift from previous years. Tens of millions of viewers are expected to be watching. Source link

Federal health officials warned that the risk of contracting dengue in the United States has increased this year, a worrying sign as global cases of the mosquito-borne disease hit record numbers.In the first half of this year, countries in the Americas reported twice as many cases as were reported in all of 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday in an alert to health care providers.The region has seen nearly 10 million cases of the virus so far in 2024, most of which originated in outbreaks in South American countries like Brazil and Argentina.While the local transmission…

This goes back to his belief that we do not matter. O’Brien, whose parents are in their 90s and who’s about to send his second of two children to college this fall, has the perspective of age. He has seen peers think fame and success would make them happy, only to be disappointed.He still agonizes, admitting to staying up one night worrying about the reception for his travel show. When he was 17, O’Brien wrote a fan letter to the essayist and author E.B. White telling him he wanted to be an artist but worried about feedback. He was thrilled…

Karim al-Masri was supposed to start his final exams on Saturday morning, just a few weeks shy of graduating. Instead, he spent his morning filling bags of water to freeze into ice, which he sold to support his family.“I should have been studying and preparing for my final exams,” said Mr. al-Masri, 18. But, more than eight months into the war, “I’m spending my days working to provide for my family to cope with the situation.”Mr. al-Masri was one of nearly 39,000 students in Gaza who were unable to take their high school final examinations scheduled to begin on Saturday…

For decades, the National Rally was the pariah of French politics — deemed so dangerous that politicians from other parties refused to engage with its members.How much that has changed became starkly apparent this month: The R.N., as the party is known by its initials in French, dominated the elections for the European Parliament, crushing President Emmanuel Macron’s party and winning a third of the votes in France. Mr. Macron soon called a surprise snap election for the powerful National Assembly, and polls suggest that the National Rally might be poised to win those, too.Jordan Bardella, the party’s president, is…

In 2011, Conan O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, stood behind the same tree-stump lectern at Dartmouth and roasted the idea of elite higher education to uproarious laughter. Mr. O’Brien’s speech continues to be watched as a comedy master class, with 4.8 million YouTube views.A 2005 speech by the writer David Foster Wallace to the graduating class of Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water,” circulated online as a transcript in the pre-social-media days and, in 2009, was published as a book.Another noteworthy commencement speech, known as “Wear Sunscreen,” was not delivered as an address but rather written as a 1997 column for…

When the White House chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, met with dozens of top executives in Washington this month, he encountered a familiar list of corporate complaints about President Biden.The executives at the Business Roundtable, a group representing some of the country’s biggest corporations, objected to Mr. Biden’s proposals to raise taxes. They questioned the lack of business representation in the Cabinet. They bristled at what they called overregulation by federal agencies.While the meeting was not antagonistic, it was indicative of three and a half years of executive grousing about Mr. Biden. Business leaders have criticized his remarks on “corporate…

Health officials in the Biden administration pressed an international group of medical experts to remove age limits for adolescent surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors, according to newly unsealed court documents.Age minimums, officials feared, could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments.Email excerpts from members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recount how staff for Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services and herself a transgender woman, urged them to drop the proposed limits from the group’s guidelines and apparently succeeded.If and when teenagers should be allowed to…