Author: NY TIMES

TikTok can add a new skill to its résumé: disco time machine.The social platform, normally populated with an endless scroll of Gen Z-ers dancing — mostly in short choreographed routines that have been practiced and perfected — has recently been infused with the energy of a surprising demographic: their Gen X parents.In the viral videos, parents are asked by their adult children to dance as they would have back in the day to the 1984 sonic ear worm “Smalltown Boy,” by the British synth-pop band Bronski Beat. Most posts are tagged #momdancechallenge, #daddancechallenge or #80sdancechallenge, and they have racked up…

Shortly before embarking on a fatal helicopter ride on Sunday, Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and his delegation of senior officials held a communal prayer. Someone suggested having lunch, but the president demurred, saying he was in a hurry to reach his next destination.Mr. Raisi boarded the aircraft and sat by a window. The foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, stopped for a picture with a crowd that was swarming the tarmac. He smiled and placed one hand over his chest while holding a brown briefcase in the other.Around 1 p.m., a convoy of three helicopters took off from a helipad on…

But in the broader picture, said Gabi Siboni, a reserve colonel and a fellow of the conservative-leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, the main problem is that the army is only dealing with dismantling the Hamas military system and not the civilian one. Hamas’s control over the civilian sphere will be its launchpad for rebuilding its military, he said.In his view, there is no alternative to an interim period of Israeli military rule in Gaza that could last several years.Mr. Hayman said that while the military effort to take Rafah city at this pace could last another two to…

With the NBA closing in on a new media rights deal, much of the focus has been on what it means for the league and its teams. But there is another beneficiary of this series of deals, which will reportedly pay the league an average of $6.9 billion over 11 years: the players.Those new deals — whether they end up with Warner Bros. Discovery Channel, NBC or Amazon as a partner with Disney — should be more than double the current deal, which is expected to pay the league about $30 million next season in the final year of its…

When Denise Carroll jumps into her pond from its ledge, she swims alongside kois named Cutie, Baby and Jason (names chosen by her two young children). She’s not crazy about sharing the water with the scaled swimmers — “I’m afraid that I’m going to jump in and land on the fish” — but Ms. Carroll, who is 44 and works in biotech sales, feels that the benefits of swimming in a chlorine-free body of water surrounded by natural plants outweigh any potential ick.After all, this pond is the swimming pool Ms. Carroll wanted, and she worked with Sarita Landscape Design…

In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case…

Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor who announced on Monday that he would apply for arrest warrants for leaders of Israel and Hamas, has gained a reputation over a long career in international law as a gifted speaker and a tough-minded litigator.A British litigator, he took over as chief prosecutor of the I.C.C. in June 2021. Before that, he had served for both the defense and the prosecution at several international courts.Among his high-profile clients were Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi; and Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, who fired him.One contentious…

Unstable rubble and debris were complicating search and rescue efforts in rural Papua New Guinea on Saturday, a day after a massive landslide buried villages and killed at least three people. Local officials said the death toll was likely to be at least in the hundreds.Nearly 4,000 people live in the three villages engulfed by the landslide early Friday, said Sandis Tsaka, the provincial administrator for Enga, which includes the affected area. He said the death toll was likely to be high because the landslide hit a densely populated area that is also a highly trafficked corridor.“Our people will consider…

Tim Cook has delivered at least seven commencement addresses since becoming the chief executive of Apple. The superstar Taylor Swift, whose concerts have been credited with lifting local economies, addressed New York University’s graduation ceremony in 2022. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Dimon — they’ve all given graduation speeches more than once.They’re obviously not doing it for the money (and typically there isn’t any). Instead, speakers have long seen graduation ceremonies as offering something increasingly rare: a stage where a large group of people gather to hear speakers impart wisdom, advice or whatever else they want to talk about.The appeal…

Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.‘Hit Man’In theaters; June 7 on Netflix.The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically…