Author: NY TIMES

President Trump has floated changing the name of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Gulf ahead of a trip to the Middle East next week, a move that infuriated Iran and its people.“I’ll have to make a decision,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I don’t know if feelings are going to be hurt.”This past week, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Trump planned to announce the renaming on his tour of several Arab countries, which have been lobbying for the change for years.The turquoise blue water has been called…

“I don’t know if you ever finished ‘Idol,’” Mr. Tesfaye said, with a good-natured smirk, during the conversation at his home in Los Angeles.“I don’t know if you got to the end yet, but I’ll help you out: By the end, our main character, Jocelyn is in a stadium in front of a crowd of people giving a speech. That was a real stadium. We shot right before I went onstage the first night. Lily did her speech to a confused audience. They thought that was part of the show,” he said.Mr. Tesfaye then went out and performed as the…

One day in the year 79, Pompeii came under fire. The explosion of nearby Mount Vesuvius sent a mushroom cloud of ash and rock into the atmosphere, pummeling the ancient Roman trading hub and resort in a ceaseless hail of tiny volcanic rocks.Many residents ran for their lives, trying to find safety with their loved ones before searing volcanic debris buried the estimated 1,500 residents who remained in Pompeii.In a study published last month in the journal Scavi di Pompei, scientists documented events at one home in the doomed city where a family sought refuge inside a back room by…

Top economic officials from the United States and China will meet on Sunday in Geneva for their second day of high-stakes negotiations, discussions that are aimed at easing tensions stemming from President Trump’s trade war.The talks have major implications for the global economy, which has been rocked by the tariffs that the United States and China have imposed on each other in recent months. Mr. Trump has imposed a minimum tariff of 145 percent on all Chinese imports, while China has hit American products with a 125 percent import tax.Such punitive levies are already disrupting the world’s supply chains. American…

A Virginia man has been charged with second-degree murder after fatally shooting a teenager who was filming a prank for TikTok known as “ding dong ditch” with two friends around 3 a.m. on Saturday, according to court records and local authorities.The Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office responded to a report of a resident firing shots during a burglary, and found two teenagers with gunshot wounds, the office said in a statement. One of the teenagers, Michael Bosworth Jr., 18, later died of his wounds. The second person was treated for minor injuries, and a third person in the group was unharmed, the…

Five mornings a week, Dr. David Slotwiner, the chief of cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital, can be found tending to human hearts.But on Sunday mornings, he is on a grass-covered field at a rural farm in Hackettstown, N.J., standing among half a dozen sheep, whistle in hand, teaching his Border collies Cosmo and Luna to herd.“It helps me think about what it takes to be an effective leader, though doctors don’t respond to whistles very well,” said Dr. Slotwiner, 58, who specializes in cardiac electrophysiology.He started coming to the farm during the coronavirus pandemic, after Cosmo began showing aggression and…

By the time Smokey Robinson performed “Cruisin’” near the end of his concert at the Beau Rivage Theater on Friday night, the mutual admiration was in full display between the Motown icon and a revering audience of nearly 1,600 people, with no mention made of the sexual assault allegations levied against him this week.Mr. Robinson had long discarded the jacket from the sparkling green suit and the tie he had begun the night with.“Do you know what you volunteered for?” he asked one woman he invited onstage.“We’ll be right back,” Mr. Robinson said when she answered that she had freely…

Before the war, this restaurant in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City served Thai food — back when one could still find the ingredients for it in northern Gaza.On Wednesday, a bloody day in the Gaza Strip, with multiple strikes, the restaurant was the site of the deadliest. Thirty-three people were killed there and 155 wounded, according to the local health ministry.I was just across the street when the strike happened, drinking coffee and using the internet at another cafe. When I made my way through the noise, smoke and dust to take photographs, I came upon a scene of…

“I threw a Zyn in as he was saying that,” Mr. Robertson said. “I was like, ‘Cool, don’t care.’”He was not persuaded to quit until later that night when he came across a post in the Reddit group from another heavy Zyn user who described similar symptoms. He reached out to the person, and the two began to talk, said Mr. Robertson, who has now gone three months without Zyn.The post had been written by Don Hood, 41, one of the three volunteer moderators whom Mr. McHugh enlisted in the last year to help. Mr. Hood spends hours each week…

In the fall of 2024, the cardinal who is now Pope Leo XIV sat at a large round table inside the Vatican, discussing the challenges that face the Roman Catholic Church with a cardinal from Ethiopia, archbishops from Cameroon and Kenya, a cardinal posted to Mongolia, and bishops from Texas and Liberia.Joining them at the table were a Catholic podcaster from Dallas; a business consultant from Melbourne, Australia; a university administrator from Fiji; and a parishioner from Myanmar, three of whom were women.Each person at the table, clergy or layperson, was allowed three minutes of uninterrupted speech.“Every voice had equal…