Author: NY TIMES

It was drizzling outside, but under the awning that covered the 10-foot-long red carpet in front of the Hard Rock Hotel, it was hot. Supermodels of every era stayed dry and picture perfect as they arrived in Midtown for a celebration of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue’s 60th anniversary.The issue has four cover stars: Gayle King, Chrissy Teigen, Kate Upton and Hunter McGrady. Ms. King’s cover has been widely celebrated, mainly for continuing the magazine’s progress in moving away from what had long been its trademark: young, perky cover models.As Ms. King made her way over the red carpet, she…

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday upholding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism will clear the way to resume a score of court cases that involve the agency but were frozen during the legal challenge, potentially including new rules for payday lenders and penalties against a money transmitter. But the ruling falls far short of eliminating the bureau’s legal obstacles.Immediately after the ruling was announced, lawyers for the bureau, which is charged with preventing consumer abuse in the financial industry, began preparing dozens of legal filings to try to unfreeze its activities. Among them are requests to federal judges…

Hotel surveillance footage published by CNN on Friday showed Sean Combs physically assaulting and kicking Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, in a manner consistent with allegations she made against him in a lawsuit that she filed and settled last year.The video shows Mr. Combs, a hip-hop mogul known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, wearing a towel and confronting Ms. Ventura while she waits for an elevator. It shows him grabbing her and throwing her to the ground, kicking her twice, grabbing some of her possessions, and beginning to drag her down the hallway by her sweatshirt.Mr. Combs, who is facing…

The police shot and killed a man in northern France on Friday after he tried to set fire to a synagogue in the city of Rouen and attacked officers who tried to stop him, the French authorities said.Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, the mayor of Rouen, a city of about 110,000 people, told reporters that firefighters had brought the outbreak of flames under control and that no one other than the assailant had been harmed.The identity and motives of the man who attacked the synagogue were not immediately clear, but the French authorities were treating it as an antisemitic act. Local prosecutors have…

Debates can get, well, ugly in Congress, but rarely do they descend to the level of physical taunts. Yet that is exactly what happened on Thursday during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee.During a discussion about whether Attorney General Merrick B. Garland should be held in contempt of Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, told Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York whose own signature red lipstick has become something of an online lightning rod, then leaped to…

When President Donald J. Trump left office, some of Wall Street’s biggest names, who had taken to him during his first term in the White House, swore they were moving on from him for good. They were fatigued by his leadership style, disappointed by some of his policies and shocked by the U.S. Capitol riot. Some of them even savaged him publicly.Their stated distaste didn’t last. With Mr. Trump leading in the polls, big financiers on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are edging into his corner, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who sought anonymity…

As it is in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, used by a quarter of the island’s 23 million residents.People post videos of themselves shopping for trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters and playing pranks on their roommates. Influencers share their choreographed dances and debate whether the sticky rice dumplings are better in Taiwan’s north or south.Taiwanese users of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are also served the kind of pro-China content that the U.S. Congress cited as a reason it passed a law that could result in a ban of…

‘13 Bombs’Stream it on Netflix.The espionage action-thriller “13 Bombs” acutely blends quick back-stabbing with big explosions. In the film, interest rates and economic inequality are running rampant in Jakarta, Indonesia. To even the odds, a Robin Hood-type group, led by a mysterious figure code-named Arok (Rio Dewanto), has planted 13 bombs across the city that will explode if thee group isn’t paid a ransom in crypto cash. As a result, two unwitting crypto traders named Oscar (Chicco Kurniawan) and William (Ardhito Pramono) are picked up by Karin (Putri Ayudya), a steely counterintelligence agent who is worried about a mole in…

Smoke rises following an airstrike in Gaza, as seen from southern Israel, on Friday.Credit…Tsafrir Abayov/Associated PressLawyers representing Israel on Friday defended the military operation in Rafah as “limited and localized,” arguing at the United Nations’ top court that the judges should not seek to restrict Israel’s actions in Gaza.At a hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israel responded to a South African petition for the court to order an immediate halt to its ground assault in Rafah.Israeli forces have advanced into the outskirts of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, over the past week and a half, ordering…

When Alexandra Vasilia Voyatzakis first saw Pontus Mikael Henriksson on the dating app Bumble in the summer of 2018, she did not swipe right, but not because he wasn’t her type. (He definitely was.)“I distinctly remember seeing his face,” said Ms. Voyatzakis, noting that she had found him attractive. But she was also worried. She had an unfortunate dating history when it came to dating handsome men, which her friends often referred to as “model-y types,” she said. Those relationships always failed.But when she saw Mr. Henriksson appear in her search again in early January 2019, she decided to give…