Author: NY TIMES

The Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina only just turned 28. Yet she already has a couple of operatic records under her belt: She’s the youngest artist ever to have sung “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera and at the Royal Opera House in London.Her trajectory began about 2,700 miles east of London.Akhmetshina was born in the village of Kirgiz-Miyaki in the Republic of Bashkortostan region of western Russia, closer to Kazakhstan than Moscow. She is one of three children of a single mother who worked in the passport office at the police station, whose own mother was a police officer in Soviet…

The men sat in rows, handcuffed and blindfolded, unable to see the Israeli soldiers who stood watch over them from the other side of a mesh fence.They were barred from talking more loudly than a murmur, and forbidden to stand or sleep except when authorized.A few knelt in prayer. One was being inspected by a paramedic. Another was briefly allowed to remove his handcuffs to wash himself. The hundreds of other Gazan detainees sat in silence. They were all cut off from the outside world, prevented for weeks from contacting lawyers or relatives.This was the scene one afternoon in late…

NORMANDY — President Biden will observe the 80th anniversary of D-Day on the beaches of Normandy on Thursday by asserting that the allied effort to stand up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a direct extension of the battle for freedom that raged across Europe during World War II.Mr. Biden, 81, who was a toddler when Americans stormed the beaches here in 1944, will almost certainly be the last U.S. president to speak at a Normandy remembrance who was alive at the time Allied forces began to push Adolf Hitler out of Europe.Now, eight decades later, Mr. Biden is leading…

Ms. von Furstenberg says that the moment that most defines her life is when her mother, Lily Nahmias, a Jewish Greek immigrant working for the Belgium resistance, was liberated from the death camp when the war ended in 1945.After 13 months in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, the 22-year-old was barely the weight of her bones, down to 29 kilos, with blue tattooed numbers, 5199, on her left arm. She had to be fed every few moments like a bird. A year later, she was married to her fiancée, a Jewish Bessarabian immigrant named Leon Halfin, who was in electronics and later…

MicroStrategy and its founder settle tax case for $40 million The attorney general for the District of Columbia has reached a $40 million settlement with the billionaire Bitcoin investor Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, the software company he founded, over tax fraud, DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch is first to report.Officials say the agreement is the biggest-ever income tax fraud recovery in the district. It’s also the first lawsuit under the district’s amended False Claims Act, which encourages whistle-blowers to file claims of tax evasion against residents who they say are concealing where they actually live.The lawsuit accused Saylor of evading more than…

Federal regulators have reached a deal that allows them to proceed with antitrust investigations into the dominant roles that Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia play in the artificial intelligence industry, in the strongest sign of how regulatory scrutiny into the powerful technology has escalated.The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission struck the deal over the past week, and it is expected to be completed in the coming days, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.Under the arrangement, the Justice Department will take the lead in investigating whether…

It’s a good time to be a countertenor. Over the last 25 years or so, 18th-century operas, most notably those by Handel, have enjoyed a rebirth in houses around the world, which has allowed the high-register countertenor male voice to sing male roles once reserved mostly for female mezzo-sopranos.This practice will be on full display this summer in a revival of “Giulio Cesare,” which will run for 15 performances from June 23 to Aug. 23 at Glyndebourne, the summer opera festival in the rolling hills of southern England. Three countertenors have been cast, including as Julius Caesar, a vocally demanding…

War has pushed Sudan toward the abyssMy colleague Declan Walsh and the photographer Ivor Prickett spent three weeks in Sudan, where few foreign reporters have had access in the past year. Since the conflict erupted there in April 2023, millions of people have been displaced and a looming famine threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.Khartoum, the capital and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground. A feud between two generals has dragged Sudan into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world’s worst humanitarian…

The only place in Disney’s media empire where you feel free to call a 22-year-old woman a “white b—” is weekday afternoon ESPN.This is where “The Pat McAfee Show” was born and became a hit across North America. On Monday’s show, he decided to use the quote to defend Caitlin Clark, opening the show with a reference to the uproar over the cheap shots she received as a WNBA rookie, sparking a debate about the character. Discussions of race and stardom.McPhee, a talented, foul-mouthed talk show host/”College GameDay” analyst/WWE commentator, decided the best way to put an exclamation point on…

U.S. consumers, fatigued by a three-year bout of inflation, want lower prices. And large retailers that have increased prices, partly to contend with their own rising costs, appear to be responding to customer concerns — to an extent.Walgreens said last week that it was lowering prices on over 1,000 items. Target recently announced modest price cuts on 5,000 food products and household goods. Craft and furniture stores like Michael’s and Ikea have also said they will drop prices on popular items.A broader range of companies have indicated on quarterly earnings calls that they plan to slow price increases and seek…