Author: NY TIMES

In the pitch-dark auditorium of Rome’s Teatro Costanzi, a high-pitched lament floated from the top galleries. Dozens of flashlights snapped on, their beams crisscrossing crazily, seeking the source of the sound.The shafts of light homed in on a spectral figure — a slim, dark-haired woman dressed in white, moving at a funereal pace and plaintively singing. In the audience, 130-odd children, ages 8 to 10, let loose squeals, some gasps, and one “it’s not real.” Several called out “Emma, Emma.”The children had just been told that the Costanzi, the capital’s opera house, had a resident phantom. No, not that one.…

In a sandy clearing near Israel’s border with Gaza, soldiers, civilians and tourists wandered silently through a dense thicket of poles. Affixed to the poles were portraits of the hundreds of people who came there to dance late one night last October and never made it home.As Israelis observed Memorial Day, the country’s annual commemoration for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks, many were drawn to the site of the Tribe of Nova music festival, a rave dedicated to peace and love that was interrupted around sunrise on Oct. 7 by a barrage of rockets from Gaza, signaling the…

With Israel’s most sacrosanct day of remembrance as a backdrop, peace activists in Israel broadcast their annual Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony on Sunday night, with parallel events in London, New York and Los Angeles.The ceremony, organized by Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle — Families Forum, two peace-building organizations, is unusual in that it tries to recognize not only Israeli grief, but also the toll of Palestinian suffering over the decades. This year’s event was especially poignant given that it was the first since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and comes amid the devastation…

I’m recently divorced after 14 years. I have lived around the world and, in a month, I am set to move to Los Angeles. Over the years I’ve amassed a wardrobe that expresses both the energy of the places I lived and the lives I lived in them with the person I once loved. But everything in my life is downsizing. So what do I keep? What do I shed? How to make these choices? — Donatella, BrooklynNot long after the actress Ellen Barkin divorced the billionaire Ronald Perelman when she was just starting to film “Ocean’s Thirteen,” Ms. Barkin…

The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the northern lights’ vivid colors across the Northern Hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigational systems in tractors and other farming equipment to break down at the height of planting season, suppliers and farmers said.Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigational technology and helps them to plant more efficiently and precisely by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlap. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, as well as in other parts of the United States and Canada, temporarily ground…

Federal officials will provide up to $120 million in grants to Polar Semiconductor to help the company expand its chip manufacturing facility in Minnesota, the Biden administration announced on Monday, the latest in a string of awards meant to strengthen the U.S. supply of semiconductors.Commerce Department officials said the grant would help Polar upgrade technology and double production capacity at its facility in Bloomington, Minn., within two years. The company produces chips that are critical for cars, defense systems and electrical grids, federal officials said.“We are making taxpayer dollars go as far as possible while crowding in private and state…

Geriatrics is a field of sleuthing. To solve medical enigmas, doctors must become detectives, teasing out the effects of overlapping causes that include chronic conditions, acute injuries, social factors and the normal process of aging. It is a challenge that tests the patience of many doctors; the number of certified geriatricians in the United States, now just over 7,000, has been decreasing since 2017.By masquerading as a diagnosis, the term “failure to thrive” cuts that sleuthing process short, shutting down inquiry before doctors can determine the real cause, said Dr. Clara Tsui, a geriatrician at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver,…

Describing their collaboration on “Last Night Reprise,” a jazzy interpretation of a poem by the 13th-century Persian writer Rumi, Karpeh recalled Aftab taking the vantage of a film director, using visual cues to encourage different takes. “There’s a trust in how we approach our music,” he said of their shared approach. “It felt very free and raw.”Aftab said Karpeh embodies her ideal player: someone who gravitates to the unique. “I search for people like that because that’s 80 percent of the thing,” she said. “There’s nothing I can write down and ask you to play if you don’t have that…

As the Israeli military stepped up pressure on what it calls Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza, fighting elsewhere in the Palestinian enclave on Sunday led to warnings that the militants might remain a force for a long time to come.Close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend, both sides said on Sunday, even as the world’s attention was largely focused on the southern city of Rafah, where Israel escalated military operations last week.It has become a familiar scenario in the Gaza Strip over the course of the seven-month war: After…

Two months before the Olympics are scheduled to begin in Paris, the global agency tasked with policing doping in sports is facing a growing crisis as it fends off allegations it helped cover up the positive tests of elite Chinese swimmers who went on to compete — and win medals — at the last Summer Games.The allegations are particularly vexing for the World Anti-Doping Agency, which has long billed itself as the gold standard in the worldwide movement for clean sports, because they raise the specter that the agency — and by extension the entire system set up to try…