Author: NY TIMES

On a balmy spring morning, after a breakfast of coffee and plain yogurt at a luxury Manhattan hotel, Jaap van Zweden grabbed his bag of conducting batons and scores by Mozart and Gubaidulina and set out for Lincoln Center through the wilds of Central Park.“I love the air, I love the trees,” he said. “Everybody can do whatever they want here. This is freedom, absolute freedom.”Van Zweden, 63, will leave the New York Philharmonic this summer after six seasons as its music director, the shortest tenure of any maestro since Pierre Boulez, the eminent French composer and conductor who led…

Iraqis have known the bitter taste of war so intimately and frequently over the past 40 years that they say they can feel viscerally the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. They remember the dreaded whistling of a shell before impact, the fear of a knock at the door bringing word of a loved one’s loss, the stench of blood drying on concrete.This was daily life for many Iraqis for years as an insurgent struggle against the American occupation and a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims brought destruction and death to their neighborhoods, shattered families and left behind countless…

The Biden administration on Tuesday laid out for the first time a set of broad government guidelines around the use of carbon offsets in an attempt to shore up confidence in a method for tackling global warming that has faced growing criticism.Companies and individuals spent $1.7 billion last year voluntarily buying carbon offsets, which are intended to cancel out the climate effects of activities like air travel by funding projects elsewhere, such as the planting of trees, that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but that wouldn’t have happened without the extra money.Yet a growing number of studies and reports…

Doing business in Hong Kong increasingly comes with a new risk: the political cost of upsetting Beijing.Chinese clients recently dropped one big Chicago law firm after it recused itself from a politically sensitive case. A former Wall Street banker was muzzled for writing a “Hong Kong is dead” column. And Google was effectively cornered into enforcing a ban on a popular protest anthem.In all areas of life, Hong Kong is hewing closer to mainland China, blurring distinctions that once cemented the city’s status as mostly free from the politics of Beijing. Legal rulings echo the courts in mainland China. City…

At the dawn of South Africa’s democracy after the fall of the racist apartheid government, millions lined up before sunrise to cast their ballots in the country’s first free and fair election in 1994.Thirty years later, democracy has lost its luster for a new generation.South Africa is now heading into a pivotal election on Wednesday, in which voters will determine which party — or alliance — will pick the president. But voter turnout has been dropping consistently in recent years. It fell to below 50 percent for the first time in the 2021 municipal elections, and analysts said that voter…

Shein, the online retail giant founded in China, had grand ambitions to go public in New York. But as relations between Washington and Beijing soured, the ultrafast fashion company began taking a closer look at a backup plan across the Atlantic.The company is now focusing more on the London Stock Exchange for its initial public offering, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That may not have been the company’s initial choice — but it would be a big win for Britain, which has been wary of its capital city losing its status as a global financial hub.Jeremy…

Over the weekend, the agency estimated that, on top of the toll of dead and missing, more than 250 houses had been abandoned as residents feared additional slippage, with roughly 1,250 people displaced. The numbers, including those reported Monday, could not be independently verified.Just getting to survivors has proved to be an enormous challenge. An aid convoy reached the area on Saturday afternoon to deliver tarps and water, but no food. On Sunday, the local government secured food and water for around 600 people, according to the U.N., but heavy equipment still had not made it through, leaving people to…

Last year, two unions representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Leaders of the unions — the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters — hoped the wins would help them organize workers across their industry.The U.A.W. won one vote to unionize a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less progress at UPS’s big nonunion rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it…

With international condemnation mounting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Monday that the killing of dozens of people a day earlier at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah was “a tragic accident,” but gave no sign of curbing the Israeli offensive in the southern Gaza city.The deadly fire that tore through the encampment on Sunday after an airstrike came at a particularly delicate time for Israel, just days after the International Court of Justice appeared to order the country’s military to halt its offensive in Rafah and as diplomats were aiming to restart negotiations for a cease-fire…

Stanley P. Goldstein, who in the early 1960s helped start a retail chain named Consumer Value Stores, which, after shortening its name to CVS — because, he said, fewer letters meant cheaper signs — grew into the largest drugstore chain in the United States, died on Tuesday at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 89.The company, which is headquartered in Rhode Island, announced his death. Family members told The Providence Journal that the cause was cancer, diagnosed about a month ago.Mr. Goldstein was frequently described as informal and no-nonsense — much like the airy, brightly lit outlets that he,…