Author: NY TIMES

Just hours before this year’s Eurovision Song Contest final was scheduled to begin in Malmo, Sweden, on Saturday, the glitzy singing competition was thrown into crisis after organizers banned the Netherlands’ entry from taking part.On Friday, the Dutch musician, Joost Klein, whose songs mix pop with hyperfast beats, did not appear for a scheduled rehearsal to perform his song “Europapa,” which was then among the favorites to win.Shortly afterward, the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, said in a statement that it was “investigating an incident” involving the Dutch artist. On Saturday morning, a Swedish police spokeswoman said in…

Manal al-Wakeel and her extended family of 30 people thought they were going home.Displaced from their home in Gaza City months ago, Ms. al-Wakeel and relatives began packing their bags on Monday and preparing to dismantle their tent in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.Hamas had announced that it had accepted a cease-fire proposal from Qatar and Egypt, leaving many Gazans thinking that a truce was imminent. Their joy was short-lived; it soon became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal endorsed days earlier by Israel, which said the two sides remained far apart.Instead,…

After all-night air raid alarms, a weary Kharkiv woke up Saturday morning to a heavy gray sky and the disconcerting news that the Russian Army continued to press its advance on nearby Ukrainian territory.All night, dull explosions from battlefields 40 miles away echoed across Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. On Saturday morning, a day after Russian forces seized several villages along the border and Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the area, the ghostly wail of air raid sirens continued to drift over the city’s deserted parks and long, empty boulevards.Thousands of people are fleeing the border areas and arriving at shelters…

“I want to be different from everyone else,” Ben Shelton said recently in Madrid.He was actually talking about last year’s decision to sign a major deal with On, a small but growing Swiss footwear and apparel maker, rather than go after some American giant bearing the famous Nike logo. (More on that later.) The Floridian is in the early stages of a three-month stay in Europe that will be as long as his stay at Wimbledon, which ends in mid-July. But the 21-year-old Shelton could have talked about anything to do with his fledgling tennis career, which was the opposite…

Call it the millennial mother midlife crisis, or M.M.M.C. The hallmark of an M.M.M.C. isn’t going off the grid, à la Rachel Fleishman, the strung-out mother in the novel (and hit streaming TV series) “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” or meeting up with other moms to release primal screams.After all, rage and angst are out, and wellness, equanimity and mental health are in. For lots of moms, the M.M.M.C. is about maintaining a chipper facade, the appearance of having it together while quietly imploding. If the M.M.M.C. had a mascot, it would be a swan, an animal gliding easily on the…

At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference this week, a little-known risky financial tool became the subject of a hot debate among Wall Street titans.Many private equity firms have quietly begun mortgaging their investment funds, piling leverage upon leverage. In other words, they’re taking out loans against the businesses they’ve already taken out loans to buy.At a time when dealmakers are desperate to raise new cash after the boom of the pandemic era, this mechanism — known as a net asset value loan — is allowing them to do it overnight.More P.E. firms are using the tool as they set out…

The ever-adaptable Post Malone moves into country with this duet with Morgan Wallen. It’s jovial on the surface, with cheerful steel-guitar hooks. But it’s deeply surly at heart, as Malone and Wallen take turns lashing out at an ex who blames them after a relationship crumbles. “It ain’t like I can make this kind of mess all by myself,” they insist. “Don’t act like you ain’t helped me pull that bottle off the shelf.” Personal responsibility? Nah.Willow embraces her outsize emotions in the full-tilt finale of her new album, “Empathogen,” which veers from her old pop-punk into jazz and prog-rock.…

The emir of Kuwait announced on Friday that he would suspend the elected Parliament for up to four years, stoking fears that he could move to dismantle one of the Middle East’s last semi-democratic political systems.“I will not permit for democracy to be exploited to destroy the state,” the emir, Sheikh Mishal Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said in a televised speech, declaring that a recent period of political turmoil required “hard decisions to save the country.”The emir also suspended several articles of the Constitution and said that the transitional period would be used to review “all aspects of the democratic…

Heavy seasonal rains have set off flash floods across Afghanistan, killing at least 137 people in one province, leaving at least 100 more missing and displacing thousands of others this weekend, officials said.The flood’s toll in the northern province of Baghlan, which appeared to have suffered the worst devastation, was likely to rise, said Hedayatullah Hamdard, the director of the provincial disaster management department. Most of the dead there were women and children, he said.Flooding began around 4 p.m. Friday and continued into the evening in Baghlan Province. Abdul Aziz Ayyar, a tribal elder, was in his home in the…

On January 9, Tonja Stelly had to be in two places at once. This is nothing new to her.This has become a tradition for the past three years The NBA and NHL schedules collided at just the right time.The Knicks take on the Portland Trail Blazers on Tuesday at Madison Square Garden, the most famous arena in the world. Her son, Quentin Grimes, who was a guard for the Knicks and now plays for the Detroit Pistons, was reported at 7:30 p.m.Twenty miles east, her son Tyler Myers, a defenseman for the Vancouver Canucks, was in Elmont, N.Y., for a…