Author: NY TIMES

Palestinians in Gaza expressed mixed feelings after the chief prosecutor at the world’s top criminal court said he was seeking arrest warrants for leaders of both Israel and Hamas on war crimes charges, a move that many said equated victim with perpetrator.“We deplore, denounce and are surprised by the decision of the International Criminal Court which places the accused, the victim, and the executioner in one cage,” said Zahir Essam, a 55-year-old living in Gaza City.Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced on Monday his decision to apply for arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader…

With his army struggling to fend off fierce Russian advances all across the front, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine urged the United States and Europe to do more to defend his nation, dismissing fears of nuclear escalation and proposing that NATO planes shoot down Russian missiles in Ukrainian airspace.Mr. Zelensky said he had also appealed to senior U.S. officials to allow Ukraine to fire American missiles and other weaponry at military targets inside Russia — a tactic the United States continues to oppose. The inability to do so, he insisted, gave Russia a “huge advantage” in cross-border warfare that it…

An angry Ricky Stenhouse Jr. confronted Kyle Busch and then punched him after Sunday night’s NASCAR All-Star race at North Wilkesboro Speedway, sparking controversy A brief fight broke out between the two teams in the garage.Stenhouse made an aggressive move on the first lap of the race and Busch ended up hitting the wall, which caused Busch to intentionally knock Stenhouse down and eliminate him on the second lap. It was an old track with no exit tunnel, so Stenhouse had nothing to do but wait for Busy until the end of the race.Sure enough, Stenhouse was standing next to…

David Dorward was a young boy when he first visited the Floral Clock, a combination of horology and horticulture initially installed in 1903 on a south-facing slope of the West Princes Street Garden in Edinburgh’s New Town area.“I remember when I was a child,” he said, “my mum and dad would bring me down to the gardens because it was a sort of focal point. As a child, you’d come down to see the cuckoo coming out at 12 o’clock.”Now 61, Mr. Dorward has been planting the clock for 42 years. And even though he officially retired two years ago…

The Numbers: Macy’s lags while Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury grow. Macy’s said its comparable-store sales in the United States fell 1.2 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. The retailer has not reported a sales increase since the first quarter of 2022. It reported a first-quarter profit of $62 million, less than half of what it made in the same quarter last year.Sales at the namesake Macy’s brand were the weakest of all of the company’s brands, falling 1.6 percent. Sales at Bloomingdale’s rose 0.8 percent, and Bluemercury’s sales rose 4.3 percent.Macy’s slightly raised the low end of its sales…

The race to put artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer.Microsoft on Monday introduced a new kind of computer designed for artificial intelligence. The machines, Microsoft says, will run A.I. systems on chips and other gear inside the computers so they are faster, more personal and more private.The new computers, called Copilot+ PC, will allow people to use A.I. to make it easier to find documents and files they have worked on, emails they have read, or websites they have browsed. Their A.I. systems will also automate tasks like photo editing and language translation.The…

Dr. Luch berated herself for not having thought to test the boy a day earlier, when she might have saved him if she had treated him for influenza.But the alarm she raised and the urgent activity that followed was testament to the strength of Cambodia’s disease tracking system and to its importance to the global biosurveillance system.It is the fruit of years of international and local investment, training and public education. It shows how frontline work in low-income countries is increasingly vital to a global system to detect zoonotic diseases — pathogens that jump between animals and humans, the way…

Chorister was an enormously difficult job even when the Met’s repertory extended from Handel through Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Puccini to the middle of the 20th century. But as the company has taken on far more contemporary opera over the past two decades — in idioms as diverse as the time-stopping repetitions of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” and the dense dissonance of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” — the demands have increased. That the chorus’s quality has increased along with them owes a great deal to Palumbo.“When we started ‘Satyagraha,’ everyone was kind of skeptical,” said Jean Braham, a…

Funeral events for Iran’s president and foreign minister were underway in Iran on Tuesday as investigators looked into the helicopter crash that killed them and the country grappled with the shock of losing two of its most prominent leaders at a volatile moment.Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has announced five days of mourning for the president, Ebrahim Raisi, 63, and the foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, 60, who died when their helicopter plunged into a mountainous area near the Iranian city of Jolfa on Sunday. The state news media said the crash had resulted from a “technical failure.” Iran’s…

Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, the obscure aristocrat who wanted to become German chancellor, and eight men and women who planned to bring him into power by violently overthrowing the government, went on trial on Tuesday in Frankfurt.Nearly a year and a half after a spectacular nationwide raid involving 3,000 police officers at 150 locations that the authorities say foiled a bizarre, far-right plan to seize power, the prince and the plotters will start facing justice. It is expected to be one of the most complex court cases since West Germany tried Auschwitz concentration camp commanders in the 1960s.In a…