Author: NY TIMES

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist both celebrated and despised for his work on Covid, on Monday forcefully denied Republican allegations that he sought to cover up the possibility that the pandemic originated in a laboratory, calling the accusation “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”In a tense appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Fauci read out an email from February 2020 in which he encouraged a scientist worried about the possibility of a lab leak to report his concerns to the F.B.I.“It is inconceivable that anyone who reads this email could conclude that I…

An elliptical halo of thin, concentrated light floated in the capacious drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory on a recent morning, above a circular space designed to dissolve your sense of space and time.At the center was Kathinka Pasveer, the widow of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing his electronic music at a console. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, sat nearby, visibly delighted by the scene around him. To his right and left, idiosyncratically shaped video screens faced each other across a round expanse dotted with lights that moved and changed color as Urs Schönebaum, the director, spoke into…

After a weekend of heavy rains, severe floods in regions of southern Germany led several towns to declare states of emergency and to evacuate their citizens from heavily affected areas. Water submerged streets and highways, broke dams and derailed a high-speed train. Even as rain let up on Monday, emergency crews rushed to fortify dams along rivers in anticipation of further flooding.On Monday morning, a 43-year-old woman was found dead in her basement in the Neuburg-Schrobenhausen district in Bavaria, according to the local authorities. She had been missing since Saturday night.Several hours later, responders who were pumping water out of…

China’s top security ministry accused Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency on Monday of persuading a married couple working for unnamed central Chinese government bodies to become spies for the British government, the latest in a volley of continuing espionage accusations between the two countries.In a post on its official WeChat account, China’s Ministry of State Security said MI6 British intelligence officials had lured a man with the surname Wang, who worked for a Chinese government agency with part-time consulting work that paid him a high salary during his visit to Britain as part of an exchange program.The Chinese ministry said MI6…

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke.Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to…

MoviePass didn’t reach five million users, but for a while it seemed as though there would be no stopping it. Under the leadership of Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, the chief executive of Helios and Matheson, the new subsidiary MoviePass Ventures produced the abysmal movie “Gotti” and threw a lot of very expensive parties in mid-2018. At the same time, if you were trying to actually use the service, it went from bad to worse to baffling: random blackout periods, strange requirements for purchasing tickets (like uploading photos of stubs) and near-constant changes to the terms and conditions. Eventually the Federal…

From the bridge of the three-masted windjammer, the Sea Cloud Spirit, the captain called out the words we’d all been waiting for.“Let’s set the sails!” he cried, after turning off the engines, while maneuvering to maintain an optimum angle for his 18 deckhands to climb into the shrouds and unfurl the ship’s 44,132 square feet of sails by hand.Like acrobats, the crew scurried up the masts to the upper topgallant sails that rose nearly 200 feet above us. The ship’s captain, Vukota Stojanovic, later insisted that none of it was for show. “Whenever there is an opportunity to sail, we…

GameStop’s shares soared on Monday after the long-dormant Reddit account associated with Keith Gill, the trader known as Roaring Kitty who helped spur 2021’s meme-stock mania, appeared to show a big stake in the video game retailer.It was GameStop’s second major rally in as many months, seemingly prompted by social media buzz. The stock more than doubled at one point in premarket trading, before settling to a gain of about 70 percent, a move adding billions of dollars to the company’s market value.Monday’s surge was driven by a screenshot uploaded to Reddit on Sunday by the account associated with Mr.…

A new documentary celebrates the life of the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. And it kicks off with the death of her mother, Judy Garland.“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (which premieres at the Tribeca Festival on June 12) opens with the vision of Garland’s rose-covered coffin being carried past thousands of mourning fans in New York in 1969.With that somber start, the director Bruce David Klein is making a point. Rather than dwell on Minnelli’s childhood years in the orbit of her prodigiously gifted mother, he sets out to show that Minnelli, 78, shot to fame almost immediately…

Top NewsFor weeks, talk-show hosts and newspaper columnists across Egypt’s government-managed media spoke with one voice: Any Israeli “occupation” of the Philadelphi Corridor, a buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border, could constitute a violation of Egypt’s sovereignty and national security. That would deal a further blow to a relationship that Israel’s military offensive in southern Gaza had already brought to its lowest point in decades.But when Israel’s military said that it had seized “tactical control” of the corridor last week, the same government mouthpieces were quick to say that the border area had nothing to do with Egypt; sovereignty went…