Author: NY TIMES

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday that he would continue to press urgently for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip despite a counterproposal from Hamas that he said included unacceptable demands.After more than eight months of war in Gaza, the proposed cease-fire deal follows an outline made public last month by President Biden and has the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council. But Israel and Hamas still appear to be far from reaching a deal.“In the days ahead, we are going to push on an urgent basis,” Mr. Blinken said, “to…

President Biden will sign a 10-year security agreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday, an effort to signal a long-term American commitment to the country’s future as an independent and sovereign state, an administration official said. But the accord could easily be upended by the coming American presidential election.The deal — whose final details were expected to be announced later Thursday — will outline a long-term effort to train and equip Ukraine’s forces, promising to provide more modern weapons and help the Ukrainians build their own self-sustaining military industry that is capable of producing its own arms, U.S.…

A few years ago, Callum Styles was doing his routine pre-match interview with the in-house media team at Barnsley when he decided he wanted to talk about something.In the words of football journalists, it was a “come to me” request.But this time in October 2020 was different. A promising young English midfielder, Styles isn’t blinking at suitors in the transfer market but wants people to know he’s qualified to play international football for Hungary or Ukraine – “Just put it in Put it there,” he recalled. Competitor”And hope to gain something.”For weeks, nothing happened. “And… you know how everything spreads…

If you or someone you love speaks almost exclusively in internet references — “It’s giving golden retriever boyfriend energy” or “Show it to me Rachel” — they may be suffering from a condition known as “brainrot.”The term refers primarily to low-value internet content and the effects caused by spending too much time consuming it. Example: “I’ve been watching so many TikToks, I have brainrot.”Online discussion of brainrot has recently grown so widespread that some social media users have begun creating parodies of people who seem to embody the condition.Several videos by the TikTok user Heidi Becker show her facing the…

The markets and Fed diverge again The bull market rally is continuing to run on Thursday. The S&P 500 is poised to set yet another record, as investors see inflation in retreat — even if Fed policymakers don’t quite see it that way.The gulf between investors and the central bank is widening again. After Wednesday’s tepid Consumer Price Index report, the odds in the futures market have risen for two interest rate cuts this year, a prospect that has triggered a stocks-and-bonds buying spree.Not so fast? The Fed’s “dot plot” projection released Wednesday sees just one cut this year, down…

The Tesla shareholder vote over Elon Musk’s pay is in some ways a referendum on the performance of the company and its chief executive.Late on Wednesday, Mr. Musk claimed victory in a social media post, saying that votes in favor of his pay package were leading by “wide margins,” giving Tesla’s stock a boost. But even before the official results are announced on Thursday, Tesla’s flagging stock price shows that investors have plenty of doubts about Mr. Musk and the electric carmaker’s outlook.Tesla’s shares are down nearly 30 percent this year, even as the broader stock market is up 14…

Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi helped to lay the groundwork for widely prescribed drugs that lower a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5. He was 90.Chiba Kazuhiro, the president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Dr. Endo was a professor emeritus, confirmed the death in a statement. The statement did not give a cause or say where he died.Cholesterol, mostly made in the liver, has important functions in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death in the United…

Morality takes a hike in Claudio Monteverdi’s final opera, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Bold in its satire and explicit in its sensuality, even more than 350 years after its creation, the work gives its ruthless lovers, Nero and Poppea, everything they desire.A decadent exploration of Nero’s Rome, “Poppea” might seem to share little with “The Comet,” a W.E.B. Du Bois short story from 1920. Using tropes of sci-fi catastrophe, Du Bois, the famous Black sociologist, asks what it would take for a racially equitable civilization to emerge. But, like Monteverdi’s opera, it has an amoral, ice-cold finish: After the merest possibility…

A commission at the United Nations published a report on Wednesday detailing acts of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, accusing both sides of war crimes and arguing that the immense loss of life in the Gaza Strip amounted to a crime against humanity.The report consisted of two parallel investigations, one focused on the Oct. 7 attack on Israel led by the armed Palestinian group Hamas, and the other on Israel’s military response. It is one of the most detailed examinations thus far of the conflict and provides legal analysis that is likely to be used in future…

Two weeks after President Biden reversed himself and approved firing American weapons into Russian territory, he and his closest allies are preparing a different kind of assault, using the proceeds from Russia’s own financial assets to aid the reconstruction of Ukraine.For two years, the world’s largest Western economies have debated how to deal with $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, which the Kremlin left in Western financial institutions after the Ukraine invasion began in 2022.Now, after long debates about whether the West could legally turn those assets over to the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the allies seem…