Author: NY TIMES

It’s the backpacker’s call to India, the sunseeker’s attraction to Mexico, and the digital nomad’s drive to get to Thailand: Go where the dollar buys more.The evergreen budget travel strategy is getting a boost this summer: The dollar has surged against a number of foreign currencies, including the Japanese yen, thanks to high interest rates offered by the Federal Reserve — attracting foreign investment, which bolsters the dollar.“A destination’s weaker currency spells greater value for U.S. tourists,” said Erina Pindar, the chief operating officer and managing partner at SmartFlyer, a global travel agency based in New York City.“This economic advantage…

On a typical day, Ali Mullen races from her job at the county health department in Helena, Mont., to pick up dinner for her three children, heads home to feed them and then goes back out for a violin lesson or a school play, crisscrossing the small city in her aging S.U.V., with a rainbow bumper sticker that reads “You Are Loved.”A big pack of gummy bears keeps her going, stashed in her handbag next to a different sort of lifesaver: a gun lock that she carries almost everywhere she goes.In a sparsely populated state where many people own firearms,…

The United Nations Security Council was expected to vote on Monday on a resolution brought by the United States calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.The U.S.-led proposal “would bring about a full and immediate cease-fire with the release of hostages,” Nate Evans, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said in a statement on Sunday. President Biden last month endorsed the proposal, which he said had been offered by Israel, “and the Security Council has an opportunity to speak with one voice and call on Hamas to do the same,” Mr. Evans added.A vote was scheduled for…

Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria is projected to drop to fourth place this year.The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies.The crisis is largely believed to be rooted in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial removal of fuel…

INDIANAPOLIS — There’s hardly a team that Caitlin Clark hasn’t played for in her life.Team USA’s Olympic team is one of them.Indiana Fever head coach Christy Sides revealed after practice Sunday that they were with the team when Clark, the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader and the No. 1 pick in the 2024 draft, recently found out she wasn’t making the varsity team. The U.S. team on the bus for the Paris Olympics.Her reaction?”‘Hey, coach, they woke up a monster,'” Sides said, reciting Clark’s words. #Indianamania HC Christie Sides said they were in the car when Caitlin Clark found out she…

If you ask a graduating M.B.A. student, a prep school guidance counselor or the internet how to be hired at the global consulting firm McKinsey, you’re likely to find a list of prestigious “target schools” where it has consistently aimed its recruiting efforts. You know the ones — Harvard, Yale, Stanford.But these days, McKinsey would prefer a different answer. “Exceptional can come from anywhere,” its career website says. And then, in case that wasn’t clear enough, “We hire people, not degrees,” and also, “We believe in your potential, regardless of your pedigree.”Katy George, Mckinsey’s chief people officer, told Fortune last…

The saloon is there. So are the dusty cowboy hats, the freshly laid railroad tracks and the Native American headdresses.But while “Dark Noon” basks in these hallmarks of Hollywood westerns, it examines them through new eyes, leaving no triumphalist cliché unquestioned. Virtually every scene in this collaboration between a Danish director and a South African theater company (at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in previews before opening June 17) ends with at least one bullet-riddled corpse on the parched red earth of the set. Many of the dead are female or Indigenous.“It is a western town,” Nhlanhla Mahlangu, the co-director…

When the four Israelis woke up in Gaza on Saturday, they had been held hostage by Hamas for 245 days. The buildings in which they were being kept, two low-rise, concrete apartment blocks, looked much like the other nearby residences in a civilian neighborhood full of Palestinian families.Within a few hours, the captives, three men and one woman, would be reunited with their own families, the result of a risky, long-planned rescue operation in which the full might of the Israeli military would be used to devastating effect.“I’m so emotional,” one hostage, Noa Argamani, 26, told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

Russia released a group of women from a prison in late May to join the fighting in Ukraine, according to two former inmates who maintain contact with those still there, potentially signaling a new phase in the Kremlin’s use of criminals in its war effort.Military recruiters collected several women from a prison outside St. Petersburg, said the former inmates, whose names are being withheld to protect them from possible retaliation. It is unclear if their release represents an isolated case, a pilot program or the start of a larger wave of recruitment of female inmates.About 30,000 women were serving time…

A court-appointed monitor overseeing the operations of the United Automobile Workers union is investigating disputes involving the union’s president, Shawn Fain, and two U.A.W. officials who say they were improperly stripped of duties.The monitor, Neil M. Barofsky, also accused the union on Monday of a “lapse in cooperation” with the investigation, saying it had taken months to turn over relevant documents and then provided only a small fraction of those requested.The union declined to comment.The assertions at issue were included in a report filed in federal court in Michigan about Mr. Barofsky’s tenure as monitor, which began in 2021 as…