Author: NY TIMES

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…

Jonathan Majors will lead a feature film for the first time since he was found guilty of assaulting and harassing his girlfriend, a conviction that doomed a lucrative contract with Marvel Studios and imperiled his status as one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood.Mr. Majors, who starred in “Creed III” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” last year, has been cast in “Merciless,” a supernatural thriller about a C.I.A. interrogator out for revenge. The movie will be directed by Martin Villeneuve and produced by Christopher Tuffin, an executive producer of the films “Sound of Freedom” and “Peppermint.”Mr. Tuffin said he…

Cyprus found itself at the center of the world’s attention this week when the leader of Hezbollah threatened to target the small island nation if it supported Israel in potential war efforts.Amid intensifying violence between the powerful Iran-backed Lebanese militia and the Israeli military at the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s chief warned on Wednesday that the armed group would punish Cyprus if it allowed Israel to use its airports and bases to target Lebanon, saying it would be “part of the war.”The warning from the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, came as world leaders were scrambling to contain the conflict between Israel…

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a felony charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, securing his freedom under a plea deal that saw its final act play out in a remote U.S. courtroom in Saipan in the Western Pacific.He appeared in court wearing a black suit with his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, and Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the United States. He stood briefly and offered his plea more than a decade after he obtained and published classified secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, moving a twisted case involving several countries and U.S.…

When Suzette Mullen finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: Am I gay?Ms. Mullen, then 54, had been married for more than two decades to her husband, whom she loved. They lived together in Montauk, N.Y., and had two adult sons. She didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring.So Ms. Mullen, an author and editor with a law degree from Harvard, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “How to know if you are gay?” on…

Some Wall Street banks, worried that landlords of vacant and struggling office buildings won’t be able to pay off their mortgages, have begun offloading their portfolios of commercial real estate loans hoping to cut their losses.It’s an early but telling sign of the broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest rates, which make it harder to refinance loans, and low occupancy rates for office buildings — an outcome of the pandemic.Late last year, an affiliate of Deutsche Bank and another German lender sold the delinquent mortgage on the…

Major record companies, including the Sony, Universal and Warner conglomerates, sued two digital music generation companies on Monday, accusing them of using copyrighted sounds and songs to train the artificial intelligence that powers their businesses.The two companies being sued, Udio and Suno, allow users to create songs almost instantly by submitting a text command, much like how A.I. services such as Midjourney produce images based on text prompts.The power of artificial intelligence is upending numerous industries, and companies that are able to take advantage of the technology can financially benefit. But the music industry plaintiffs argued in their lawsuits that…

After hundreds of pilgrims died in the scorching desert heat during the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the Egyptian government announced on Saturday that it had suspended the licenses of 16 tour companies that had facilitated travel for some pilgrims to Saudi Arabia.At least 450 people have died during this year’s pilgrimage, in which travelers endured maximum temperatures that ranged from 108 degrees to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (42 to 49 degrees Celsius). But the actual number of fatalities is expected to climb as governments get more accurate tallies of the deaths. (Egypt, for one, has officially acknowledged only 31 deaths.)In…

When Emperor Naruhito and of Japan will visit Kew Gardens on Thursday as part of a state visit to Britain, the links between his island nation and the famed London landmark will be on full display.Dotted through the botanic gardens’ 330 acres are constant reminders of that longstanding relationship. In a large greenhouse, bronze sculptures of bonsai trees — some nearly the height of the room — stand in tribute to the Japanese horticultural art form. A short walk away is the Japanese Gateway, an intricately carved cypress replica of a Kyoto temple. Nearby, gravel neatly raked into waves and…

Chappell Roan was molting. As Ms. Roan, a pop artist on the rise, walked onstage to appear on “The Tonight Show” last week, raven-black feathers drifted from her minidress onto the stage at 30 Rock. Feathers at least three feet long stuck out from her neckline all the way to Jimmy Fallon’s desk, nearly brushing his coffee mug.“I was like, Fallon’s going to get his eye poked out,” said Genesis Webb, who had spent the past three months gathering plumage in her capacity as Ms. Roan’s stylist. She outfitted the singer in an eerie black swan dress for the interview…