Author: NY TIMES

Five mornings a week, Dr. David Slotwiner, the chief of cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital, can be found tending to human hearts.But on Sunday mornings, he is on a grass-covered field at a rural farm in Hackettstown, N.J., standing among half a dozen sheep, whistle in hand, teaching his Border collies Cosmo and Luna to herd.“It helps me think about what it takes to be an effective leader, though doctors don’t respond to whistles very well,” said Dr. Slotwiner, 58, who specializes in cardiac electrophysiology.He started coming to the farm during the coronavirus pandemic, after Cosmo began showing aggression and…

By the time Smokey Robinson performed “Cruisin’” near the end of his concert at the Beau Rivage Theater on Friday night, the mutual admiration was in full display between the Motown icon and a revering audience of nearly 1,600 people, with no mention made of the sexual assault allegations levied against him this week.Mr. Robinson had long discarded the jacket from the sparkling green suit and the tie he had begun the night with.“Do you know what you volunteered for?” he asked one woman he invited onstage.“We’ll be right back,” Mr. Robinson said when she answered that she had freely…

Before the war, this restaurant in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City served Thai food — back when one could still find the ingredients for it in northern Gaza.On Wednesday, a bloody day in the Gaza Strip, with multiple strikes, the restaurant was the site of the deadliest. Thirty-three people were killed there and 155 wounded, according to the local health ministry.I was just across the street when the strike happened, drinking coffee and using the internet at another cafe. When I made my way through the noise, smoke and dust to take photographs, I came upon a scene of…

“I threw a Zyn in as he was saying that,” Mr. Robertson said. “I was like, ‘Cool, don’t care.’”He was not persuaded to quit until later that night when he came across a post in the Reddit group from another heavy Zyn user who described similar symptoms. He reached out to the person, and the two began to talk, said Mr. Robertson, who has now gone three months without Zyn.The post had been written by Don Hood, 41, one of the three volunteer moderators whom Mr. McHugh enlisted in the last year to help. Mr. Hood spends hours each week…

In the fall of 2024, the cardinal who is now Pope Leo XIV sat at a large round table inside the Vatican, discussing the challenges that face the Roman Catholic Church with a cardinal from Ethiopia, archbishops from Cameroon and Kenya, a cardinal posted to Mongolia, and bishops from Texas and Liberia.Joining them at the table were a Catholic podcaster from Dallas; a business consultant from Melbourne, Australia; a university administrator from Fiji; and a parishioner from Myanmar, three of whom were women.Each person at the table, clergy or layperson, was allowed three minutes of uninterrupted speech.“Every voice had equal…

Top economic officials from the United States and China are poised to meet in Geneva on Saturday for high-stakes negotiations that could determine the fate of a global economy that has been jolted by President Trump’s trade war.The meetings, scheduled to continue on Sunday, will be the first since Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and China retaliated with its own levies of 125 percent on U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat effectively cut off trade between the world’s largest economies while raising the possibility of a global economic downturn.While the stakes for the meetings are high,…

Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the State of Texas on Friday to settle two lawsuits accusing it of violating the privacy of state residents by tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information.The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who secured the settlement, brought the suits in 2022 under Texas laws related to data privacy and deceptive trade practices. Less than a year ago, he reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations it had illegally tagged users’ faces on its site.Google’s settlement is the latest…

Public health officials in Los Angeles County have declared an outbreak of hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver infection driven by a virus that can, in rare cases, cause severe illness.The condition, which is typically identified in fewer than 50 people in L.A. County each year, infected at least 138 people in 2024 and cases have remained unusually high so far in 2025. Officials say that levels of the virus in local wastewater suggest these figures are an undercount.Here’s what to know.How is hepatitis A transmitted?The hepatitis A virus is spread through the so-called oral-fecal route, which means it is…

Jury selection for Sean Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial was delayed on Friday over worries that some jurors might get “cold feet” before the start of the high-profile case.Judge Arun Subramanian, who is overseeing the case, expressed concern that if jurors were selected before the weekend, they could grow uneasy and drop off the panel before the trial begins on Monday. The decision came after one potential juror sent an email to the court asking to be left off the panel for “issues of personal well-being,” the defense said.Twelve jurors and six alternates will be selected and sworn in on…

Exploring a photograph of the aftermath of a deadly airstrike at a Gaza City restaurant.