Author: NY TIMES

A strange thing happened a few years ago when Christine Longnecker, who teaches horseback riding in and around Erie County, Pa., brought her new rescue dog, Miles, to a class. Instead of waiting quietly with the other non-horses in the barn, Miles suddenly sprinted into the ring and bounded over the fences himself.“He looked so excited,” Ms. Longnecker said. “And then he turned and barked as if to say, ‘This is how you do it.’”That was the beginning of Miles’s career as an agility dog — the sort of dog you might see sprinting over and through obstacles while its…

The Biden administration is set to announce new tariffs as high as 100 percent on Chinese electric vehicles and additional import taxes on other Chinese goods, including semiconductors, as early as next week, according to people familiar with the matter.The move comes amid growing concern within the administration that Mr. Biden’s efforts to jump-start domestic manufacturing of clean energy products could be undercut by China, which has been flooding global markets with cheap solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other products.The long-awaited tariffs are the result of a four-year review of the levies that President Donald J. Trump imposed on…

The movies of Coralie Fargeat are not for the fainthearted: Blood and gore play an absolutely central role.There was so much of it in her body-horror movie “Revenge” (2017) — her first full-length feature — that, on set in Morocco, extra quantities of fake blood had to be constantly prepared using ingredients shipped over from France.Fargeat’s new title “The Substance” — starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid — promises to be no less violent and is one of 22 contenders for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Tuesday.Fargeat, who was born in Paris,…

Fuel trucks rolled into the Gaza Strip on Friday, after five days without fuel deliveries that U.N. officials said had left hospitals and other parts of the international aid mission facing imminent closure.The arrival of fuel holds off that collapse temporarily, but leaders of the aid effort say reserves remain dangerously low, and there is still a deepening hunger crisis. The United Nations’ food agency and its primary aid agency in Gaza, UNRWA, will run out of food for distribution in southern Gaza on Saturday, said Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. aid office in the southern city of Rafah.Gaza’s…

The stakes could hardly be higher.This July, for the first time in more than a decade, Venezuelans will vote in a presidential election with an opposition candidate who has a fighting — if slim and improbable — chance at winning.Amid an economic and democratic crisis that has led more than seven million Venezuelans to abandon the country — considered among the world’s largest displacements — Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian president, has done something few thought he would: allowed an opposition candidate with widespread support to appear on the ballot.Though largely unknown, the challenger is leading in several polls, underscoring…

In October 2023, Oscar Avilez Marquina and Luis Lopez, newlyweds from New York, flew to Europe to spend two weeks on a city-hopping tour between Nice, France; Paris; and Amsterdam. JetBlue had just launched direct flights to Paris from Kennedy International Airport, and the deal was too good for the couple to pass on.“Going to Paris has always been a dream for me and for Luis as well,” said Mr. Avilez Marquina, 30, who is currently unemployed. “I’m so happy that the first time we got to visit, it was together because that’s going to become a core memory that…

Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast…

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…