Author: NY TIMES

Joseph Gonzalez, a cowboy wandering around the Outlaw Oasis, a merchandise area at the rodeo, was hopeful that exposure to a new crowd would be a good thing.“Not necessarily a crisis, but the rodeo culture is kind of dying,” he said. “This rodeo is a good way to get people here — young kids, families — you don’t have to own a horse, you don’t even have to live the life, as long as you like horses, cowboys and rodeo. I mean, social media, the internet, it’s a good way for people to learn about rodeo culture.”

A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday afternoon, abruptly shutting down daily activities, halting trains and subways, cutting off traffic lights, closing stores and canceling or delaying some flights.The cause of the blackout, which stranded tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula, was still unknown by Tuesday morning, though several officials said there were no signs of foul play.“At this point, there are no indications of any cyberattack,” António Costa, the president of the European Council, wrote on X after communicating with the leaders of Spain and Portugal, who both assembled emergency meetings. “Grid operators…

Canada chooses a leader to take on Trump Canadians vote on Monday to determine which political party forms their next government.But President Trump’s tariff assault on Canada and his vow to annex the country and make it the 51st state have turned the federal election into a referendum on which of the two contenders — Prime Minister Mark Carney of the Liberal Party or Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservatives — can best handle the American president, Ian Austen writes for DealBook.The only English-language election debate last week opened with the moderator asking Carney, who has been the prime minister…

The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has entered a new arena: satellite internet.Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the most powerful providers of cloud computing.So perhaps it is not a surprise that Amazon has now launched the first few of thousands of satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for remaining connected in the modern world. The market for beaming…

Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or…

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeFor the second weekend in a row, the box office was dominated by “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s horror-drama musical about the tension between the ground-level cultural revolution of the blues and the parasitic music industry, depicted here as literal vampires.For Coogler, it’s a return to original content following a long detour making extremely lucrative intellectual property films. “Sinners” reunites him with Michael B. Jordan, who plays a pair of twins, known as Smoke and Stack, whose creative, emotional and instinctual tugs lead them down deeply fraught and unclear pathways.On this week’s…

When rebel forces took over Syria, they pledged to unite the country’s disparate armed groups into a unified national army.The biggest challenge for them by far has been in northeastern Syria, an autonomous region run by the country’s Kurdish minority where suspicion of the new leadership runs deep.In past years, the rebels and the Kurds fought each other. But with the rebels now governing Syria, they are working to form an alliance and merge the powerful Kurdish-led military into the new national force.Interviews with dozens of people in the northeast in late March revealed that Kurdish distrust of the new…

Brittany Romano, 32, was not looking to start her own long-distance rom-com last September when she showed up to JetBlue’s lounge at LaGuardia Airport 10 minutes before her flight was set to board — but she did.That’s where she met Matt Harrington, 35, a schoolteacher from Pasadena, Calif. He had spied her rushing through security, and when she stopped in the lounge for her usual routine — “take a shot and use the restroom” — he sent her a tequila shot and took one himself. Then the two jogged to catch their plane, as it turned out they were on…

Canada’s Monday polls are broadly seen as the most important election in a generation.One of the world’s most prosperous nations and America’s closest ally and trading partner, Canada has found itself in recent months unexpectedly in the cross hairs of President Trump, targeted with tariffs and annexation threats.But the country has also seen many of its coveted national accomplishments in regard to the economy and social issues slip, including higher costs of living, high unemployment, rising housing costs and a surge in homelessness and substance abuse. Many of these problems, not just in Canada but in other advanced economies, were…

President Trump’s shake-up of the global trade system has sent tremors through the long-held view that the United States is the source of the world’s safest financial assets. That’s created an opportunity for Europe.The market tumult in which investors simultaneously sold off the U.S. dollar, American stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds eased last week as Mr. Trump backed off his threats to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure foreign officials that trade deals would be struck.But many European officials attending the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World…