Author: NY TIMES

With Israeli troops returning to clear Hamas for the second or third time from parts of northern Gaza, and fighting farther south in Rafah, too, Israel’s government has found itself confronting more vocal discontent from an important constituency: its own military leaders.Current and former senior military officers have begun to argue more openly that because the government has failed to roll out a plan for what follows the fighting in Gaza, Israeli troops are being forced — in the eighth month of the war — to battle again for areas of the territory where Hamas fighters have reappeared.Two Israeli officials,…

As the sun set over the River Thames on Monday night, London’s favorite supermodel Kate Moss struck a pose for the mob of paparazzi gathered outside the soaring industrial heft of the Tate Modern. A stream of stars soon followed, including Dua Lipa, Paul Mescal, Debbie Harry, Solange Knowles and Demi Moore, her tiny Chihuahua Pilaf tucked under her arm like a handbag. They had gathered for Gucci and its creative director, Sabato De Sarno. The budget — and the stakes — could not have been bigger as he presented his debut cruise collection.Gucci is one of the most recognizable…

Wall Street is feeling meme stock déjà vu.An army of small investors this week have been driving up the price of GameStop, the video game retailer whose enormous 2021 rally led to fame for the stock’s chief social-media savvy booster (Keith Gill, known as Roaring Kitty), a Netflix series and a movie, a congressional hearing, an investigation by securities regulators — and steep losses for those who mistimed the stock’s rapid rise and fall.GameStop’s stock jumped more than 60 percent on Tuesday, after it gained more than 70 percent on Monday, adding billions in market value. The shares of the…

Darren Criss, who parlayed a breakout role on “Glee” into a multifaceted career in television, theater and music, will return to Broadway this fall in a new musical that is nominally about robots but is also about life, love and loss.The show, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is a rarity for Broadway: a fully original musical — not adapted from a pre-existing story or song catalog. Criss will star alongside Helen J Shen and two other actors in the musical, which is set in Seoul in the late 21st century and is about two outmoded helperbots who meet at a robot retirement…

On her 35-acre ranch in Texas, the actor-singer Betty Buckley has been dreaming of playing a Western heroine at last — ideally in something by Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” creator, who shoots nearby.“I have literally contemplated going to his ranch and just knocking on the door,” Buckley, 76, said the other afternoon, and laughed.This week, though, she is slated to perform in Manhattan, Thursday through Saturday at Joe’s Pub, with songs and arrangements new to her show. After a year and a half of physical challenges including long Covid and compression fractures in her spine, she has worked her way…

The United Nations has begun citing a much lower death toll for women and children in Gaza, relying on a more conservative source for the breakdown of people killed during Israel’s military offensive in the territory.As recently as May 6, the U.N’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in regularly updated online report that at least 9,500 women and 14,500 children were among the dead, out of an overall death toll of 34,735.Two days later, the U.N. said in another online update that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been killed. While the total number of deaths remained…

Russian security agents detained a senior general early Tuesday, widening a purge of the country’s sprawling Defense Ministry amid President Vladimir V. Putin’s broader shake-up of his government.Lt. Gen. Yuri Kuznetsov, who oversaw the ministry’s personnel department, was detained on an accusation of “large-scale” bribery, Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal law enforcement agency, said in a statement on Tuesday.His detention came after Mr. Putin unexpectedly removed his long-serving defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, from his post and replaced him with a member of his economic team.Prosecutors said General Kuznetsov received a bribe from “commercial interests” between 2021 and 2023, when…

Sandra Dolores Yawn has been locked up, left for dead on a Florida highway and chased through the Red Sea by pirates.In the summer of 2018, Leah Rae Shafer reached out on Facebook to send Ms. Yawn her blessings. Not because she thought Ms. Yawn, who goes by Captain Sandy, needed her well wishes, but because she had started watching “Below Deck Mediterranean” on Bravo.The show follows a crew tasked with catering to a revolving cadre of guests who have chartered a superyacht. Ms. Yawn, a star of the series, is at the helm. Ms. Shafer had written to congratulate…

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, reiterated that policymakers were poised to hold interest rates steady at a high level as they waited for evidence that inflation is slowing further.Fed officials entered 2024 expecting to make interest rate cuts, having lifted borrowing costs sharply to a more than two-decade high of 5.3 percent between 2022 and the middle of last year. But stubbornly rapid inflation in recent months has upended that plan.Central bankers have been clear that rate cuts this year are still possible, but they have also signaled that they are planning to leave interest rates on hold…

New chatbot technology can talk, laugh and sing like a human. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Source link