Author: NY TIMES

Hewing to character, the Thompson matriarch kept things light during the interview, regardless of topic. “I just can’t take things too seriously, unless they truly, truly are,” she said. “People are riddled with angst about not very much, I find.”She maintains an equally philosophical attitude toward her dysphonia. “When you have something like this, you tell yourself, ‘Well, at least it’s not cancer,’ just as, I suppose people with cancer say, ‘Well, at least I’m not dead.’”For the interview, Thompson spoke for an hour by video call from her home in London (followed by some email exchanges). And though her…

He is an Egyptian mogul who is little known outside the region.The tycoon, Ibrahim al-Organi, chairman of Organi Group, oversees a vast network of companies involved in construction, real estate and security. He maintains close connections to top Egyptian officials, three people who have tracked the relationship and who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their work in the region.But it is Hala — a company that Organi Group has listed as one of its own — that has drawn the most scrutiny. Hala has emerged as a lifeline for Palestinians who are trying to escape war-torn Gaza but…

The European Union has agreed to a new raft of economic sanctions against Russian individuals and companies, the Belgian government said on Thursday. Notably, they include measures aimed at squeezing Russia’s profits from the sale of liquefied natural gas to E.U. members.Most E.U. countries stopped importing natural gas that arrived by pipeline from Russia immediately after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But the bloc had refrained from initiating any formal sanctions against Russian gas imports, leading many E.U. countries to instead buy L.N.G. from Russia, which arrives by ship.The latest action includes measures targeting imports of Russian…

“Alexi and I have been working together for 10 years,” said Stu Holden, a Fox Sports analyst and former U.S. men’s national team midfielder. “He was one of the first people I was asked about. They said, ‘What about the guy off camera?This is what many people think when watching Alexi Lalas play. Famous for his gunpowder contribution.He has a notable football pedigree, with nearly a century of caps for his country and playing in Serie A and MLS. In a sign of his influential status, world governing body FIFA conducted a feasibility study in 2021 as part of a…

Like many members of Gen Z, Kalissa Persaud is not about to be spotted in a pair of too-short socks. Ms. Persaud, 22, who lives in Queens, almost exclusively wears crew socks that reach her calves: “I’ve gotten so used to not seeing my ankles that it would be really jarring if I did.”Night Noroña, 18, who lives in San Diego, recently threw away all of his socks that hit below the ankle. He said he knew hardly anyone who wore them, except for his father. “I’m like, ‘You’ve got to get some longer socks on you,’” he said.Gen Z…

The ravenous came for a taste of home in a dish of spicy fried beef or steamed fish head. Waiters, speaking in Mandarin, delivered plates heated with green and red chiles.It was opening night in Hong Kong at Return Home Hunan, a well-known chain from mainland China trying to wedge into the city’s competitive food scene. Huang Haiying, the restaurant’s founder, greeted customers in a bright red suit while waiters handed out red envelopes stuffed with coupons.Hong Kong is a difficult place to open a restaurant these days. Fewer people are dining out, and more restaurants have closed than opened…

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined other board members to force out Sam Altman, the company’s high-profile chief executive, has helped found a new artificial intelligence company.The new start-up is called Safe Superintelligence. It aims to produce superintelligence — a machine that is more intelligent than humans — in a safe way, according to the company spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey.Dr. Sutskever, who has said he regretted moving against Mr. Altman, declined to comment. The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg.Dr. Sutskever, 38, left OpenAI last month and announced at the time that he would…

In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air-conditioning. Other students, not so much — they were stuck in older dorms without A.C.Jose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, a Harvard researcher at the time, decided to take advantage of this natural experiment to see how heat, and especially heat at night, affected the young adults’ cognitive performance. He had 44 students perform math and self-control tests five days before…

On Tuesday afternoon in Sag Harbor, Janice Yu of WABC-TV was sitting in the passenger seat of a Nissan news van, eating from a bag of Smart Food popcorn. It was as close as she would come to getting to a kernel of news.“We don’t even know who he was with,” she said, referring to the singer and actor Justin Timberlake, who had been arrested by a Sag Harbor police officer shortly after midnight on Tuesday and charged with driving while intoxicated.Ms. Yu, a reporter for ABC7 Eyewitness News in New York, was one of many journalists parked along Main…

Remains of the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in deep water, and perhaps the oldest complete wreck in any water, have been located in the Mediterranean Sea about 56 miles off the coast of northern Israel.The Israel Antiquities Authority, which announced the find on Thursday, said that preliminary examination of two clay jars known as Canaanite amphorae indicated that the merchant vessel, an estimated 39 to 46 feet long, sank sometime between 1400 B.C. and 1300 B.C., an epoch when the Egyptian empire stretched from what is now northern Syria to Sudan, and the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun briefly sat on the…