Author: NY TIMES

Since the early days of the pandemic, owners of big buildings in New York and other large cities have been desperately hoping that the commercial real estate business would recover as workers returned to offices.Four years on, hybrid work has become common, and the strain on property owners is intensifying. Some properties are going into foreclosure and being sold for sharply lower prices compared with valuations from less than a decade earlier, leaving investors with steep losses.While the number of office buildings reaching critical stages of distress remains small, the figure has increased sharply this year. And investors, lawyers and…

Mitsuko Uchida is one of the world’s foremost pianists, renowned for her crystalline touch and her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert. She is in demand at leading concert halls and festivals, but is also a celebrated mentor to young performers. She is of such stature that she often travels with her own 1,064-pound Steinway Model D concert grand piano, as well as a dedicated technician for it.Periodically, for about two years, I had been working to land an interview with Uchida, 75, who was born in Japan and moved at age 12 to Austria, where her father became Japan’s ambassador.…

A mother begs her dead child to take her hand. A young man, wrapped in bandages, lies weeping next to the corpse of another man. A little boy, his face coated in dust and blood, stares vacantly from a hospital floor as people shout frantically around him.The scenes at the doorstep of the last functioning hospital in central Gaza, posted on social media by a Palestinian videographer after an Israeli strike hit a United Nations school complex, have yet again highlighted the awful dilemma that Palestinian civilians keep facing through eight months of war: The places where they seek refuge…

Russian investigators said on Thursday that they had detained a French national in Moscow on suspicion of collecting intelligence about activities of the Russian military, adding to a list of foreign citizens held in the country since the invasion of Ukraine.The Russian state news agency TASS identified the detained individual, citing its sources in law enforcement, as Laurent Vinatier. The agency said Mr. Vinatier was employed as a consultant at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Swiss-based nonprofit.On its website, the center states that its mission is to “prevent and resolve armed conflicts around the world through mediation and discreet…

Blazing a PathTrading poodle skirts and blouses for trucker hats and flannels, decades before the term “gender nonconforming” entered the mainstream, Aunt Barbara stopped trying to fit into her Missouri farm town. I innocently called her “Uncle Barbara” as a toddler. She always laughed. For all of her standing out, for the acceptance that she demanded and received, Barb’s inner life is unknowable. Long gone from cancer, she left me two important gifts: a record of her courageous clothing preferences — deeply provocative in her time — captured in family photos, and a blazed path for her family to accept…

Tariffs aimed at protecting America’s solar industry from foreign competition snapped back into place on Thursday, ending a two-year pause that President Biden approved as part of his effort to jump-start solar adoption in the U.S.The tariffs, which will apply to certain solar products made by Chinese companies in Southeast Asia, kicked in at a moment of growing global concern about a surge of cheap Chinese solar products that are undercutting U.S. and European manufacturers.The Biden administration has been trying to build up America’s solar industry by offering tax credits, and companies have announced more than 30 new U.S. manufacturing…

If you haven’t yet seen the new and already-infamous Apple ad — the one in which a giant mechanical compactor violently crushes a bunch of musical instruments, books, sculptures, art supplies and toys, turning them into an iPad Pro — then Apple’s executives are probably happy. They’ve seen the headlines: “Apple iPad Ad Is Bad”; “Why the Stink of That Bad, Bad iPad Ad Won’t Go Away”; “Apple’s New iPad Ad Is a Neat Metaphor for the End of the World.” They’ve seen the mocking posts on social media. They’re aware that Hugh Grant has weighed in. (“The destruction of…

After writing their verses, the Lisdoonvarna kids traveled to Cork to meet up with the Kabin Crew and film a music video to accompany the song, both groups dressing in colorful clothing and accessories. When they gathered in the morning, Heidi said, they were encouraged to decorate themselves with face paint and glow sticks.Heidi wore a green bucket hat for the video, while Treasure performed with a pair of sunglasses that were perched atop her head before slowly sliding down to the bridge of her nose. “Grooving through my town, people be like ‘who are they?’. Moving to my music,…

One by one, Greek soldiers, bellies full from a breakfast of red wine and dry bread, armed and clad themselves in a bulky, buglike suit of armor as they prepared for battle.They aimed their spears at wooden targets, and their chariot was connected to a treadmill motor, but for 11 hours, these elite soldiers from the Hellenic Armed Forces pretended to fight as if it was the 15th century B.C.They had been recruited for a study to determine if the Dendra panoply, a suit of armor from 3,500 years ago considered to be one of the oldest known from the…

The European Central Bank lowered interest rates on Thursday for the first time in nearly five years, signaling the end of its aggressive policy to stamp out a surge in inflation.As inflation returned within sight of the bank’s 2 percent target, officials cut their three key interest rates, which apply across all 20 countries that use the euro. The benchmark deposit rate was lowered to 3.75 percent from 4 percent, the highest in the bank’s 26-year history and where the rate had been set since September.“The inflation outlook has improved markedly,” policymakers said in a statement on Thursday. “It is…