Author: NY TIMES

Israel’s military said it was pressing on with its ground assault in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday despite mounting international outrage over its operations there, including an airstrike over the weekend that killed dozens of civilians.The military said its troops were engaging in close-quarters combat with Hamas fighters and that it had deployed an additional “combat team” to Rafah, without specifying how many more soldiers were sent to the southern city.The military has said that its strike on Rafah on Sunday — which ignited a deadly fire that killed at least 45 people — targeted a Hamas compound.On Monday,…

The idea is simple: Artists upload high-resolution images of their work. A fulfillment center prints and ships editions direct to consumers, at different sizes, on materials that range from wall-mounted canvas and acrylic panels to yoga mats and tank tops. A.I.-powered statistical analysis tracks your potential buyers; a marketing calendar maps your social media strategy. The bespectacled sales representative showed me a summary of one artist’s yearly take: over $80,000. If I signed up in the next few hours, he said — at $1,699 upfront for the basic Bronze membership tier, plus $50 a month for the web store —…

Adam Neumann has officially admitted defeat in his quest to buy back WeWork, ending his bid to acquire the co-working company, which he helped found in 2010 and built into a global enterprise valued at $47 billion before it fell into bankruptcy last year.“For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive,” Mr. Neumann said in a statement to the DealBook newsletter. “Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.”The writing was on the wall for weeks. Mr.…

Ryan Salame, a top executive at the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on Tuesday, making him the first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s circle of advisers at FTX to receive prison time.Mr. Salame, 30, a trusted lieutenant of Mr. Bankman-Fried, the exchange’s founder, pleaded guilty last year to a campaign finance law violation and a charge of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He is one of four top deputies in the FTX empire who have pleaded guilty to crimes since the company imploded in November 2022.Mr. Salame’s sentence exceeded the five to…

The writer said he was an identity thief — a ring leader on the dark web, with a network of “worms” placed throughout the United States.In an email to The New York Times, he said his ring preyed on the dead, the unsuspecting and the elderly, especially those from Florida and California, using birth certificates and other documents to discover personal information that aided in their schemes.“We figure out how to steal,” he said. “That’s what we do.”Recently, the writer suggested, the group had turned its attention to a major target: the estate of Lisa Marie Presley, which last week…

Tor Wennesland, the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, condemned the airstrikes and said he was “deeply troubled by the deaths of so many women and children in an area where people have sought shelter.”Germany’s public broadcaster reported that the country’s vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, said on Saturday that Israel’s offensive in Rafah was “incompatible with international law.” Senior German officials had previously warned Israel against attacking Rafah, but Mr. Habeck’s comments appeared to represent a hardening of that tone in a country with a longstanding policy of support for Israel.“Israel must not carry out this attack,…

Georgia’s Parliament overrode a presidential veto to give final approval on Tuesday evening to a contentious bill that has plunged the country into a political crisis and threatened to derail the pro-Western aspirations of many Georgians in favor of closer ties with Russia.The law will require nongovernmental groups and media organizations that receive at least 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as organizations “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The country’s justice ministry will be given broad powers to monitor compliance. Violations could result in fines equivalent to more than $9,000.The passage of the bill is…

Spring’s warmth is a flirt, but New Yorkers are ready for the season’s unpredictability. Source link

Big Oil’s big climate showdown Months of tensions between oil majors and activist investors could reach a boiling point at the annual meetings of Exxon Mobil and Chevron Wednesday, as the U.S. giants pump record levels of crude and sit on bumper profits.Facing another defeat, the climate groups that bought shares to try to influence corporate behavior are now rethinking their strategies, Vivienne Walt reports for DealBook.Activists’ efforts to pressure Big Oil to clean up its polluting ways are faltering. Last week, climate change protests rocked Shell’s annual meeting in London. But the company easily saw off a measure filed…

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world’s leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strives to build “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for A.I. products including chatbots, digital assistants akin to Apple’s Siri, search engines and…