Author: NY TIMES

After a long stretch of high inflation, the Bank of England finally has its 2 percent inflation target firmly within its sights.The central bank said on Thursday that inflation is expected to reach the target in two years, and then go even lower, as policymakers inched toward cutting interest rates.The majority of the bank’s nine-person rate-setting committee voted this week to hold rates at 5.25 percent, the highest since early 2018 and where they have been for nine months. But two members voted to cut rates, compared with just one at the previous meeting in March. And Andrew Bailey, the…

The voice of Michael McDonald has been compared to velvet, silk and sandpaper, melted chocolate and last year, by a besotted 11-year-old girl, an angel. He has harmonized with the best in the business. But his latest duet might cause even the most Botoxed foreheads of Hollywood to furrow.“How you like us so far?” joked Paul Reiser, the actor and comedian, from one corner of a squishy sofa in McDonald’s Santa Barbara, Calif., aerie on a recent Tuesday morning. He was there to talk about the singer’s memoir, which they wrote together and will be published by Dey Street Books…

Tens of thousands of people have fled since an Israeli call this week to evacuate part of the southern Gazan city of Rafah, the United Nations said on Thursday, as Israeli airstrikes intensify and fears grow that an incursion by Israeli ground forces to take over a border crossing could lead to a full-scale invasion.The mass flight from the east of the city, a major hub for people displaced from their homes along Gaza’s border with Egypt, is just the latest time that people have been forced to flee since Israel launched a war to dismantle Hamas, the armed group…

The United Nations has warned that Israel’s military incursion into Rafah and closure of border crossings is a major setback for aid operations in the Gaza Strip, with dire implications for its people.No aid trucks have entered Gaza since Sunday, the United Nations said on Wednesday, as Israel sent tanks and troops into Rafah and blocked the two southern crossings where most aid has entered, at Rafah on the Egyptian border and near Kerem Shalom on the Israeli frontier.Israel said that the Kerem Shalom crossing reopened on Wednesday, but did not indicate when the Rafah crossing would reopen. The U.N.…

This article is part of our Design special section about water as a source of creativity.Water is a popular motif with product designers because it symbolizes tranquillity and clarity. But this force of nature also “adds movement, freedom and flow in a space,” said Golnar Roshan, who with her partner, Ruben de la Rive Box, recently introduced a rug collection called Fluid that evokes the moody skies reflected in the canals of Amsterdam, where they live.“I like to mix worlds that seem far apart, create unexpected connections and imaginative short circuits between things,” Paola Navone, a designer in Milan, said…

The New York Times and The Washington Post received three Pulitzer Prizes each on Monday for a wide array of journalism that spanned conflict and injustice around the globe, including the plight of child migrant workers in the American Midwest, the lethal consequences of war in the Middle East and the brutal repression of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.The prize for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, went to ProPublica for exposing a web of questionable financial entanglements involving Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. The series, which revealed that Justice Thomas failed to disclose…

Some users will scoff at befriending a chatbot. But others, especially people for whom socializing is hard or unappealing, will invite A.I.s into the innermost parts of their lives.This shift will be jarring. You’ll wake up one day and someone you know (possibly your kid) will have an A.I. friend. It won’t be a gimmick, a game or a sign of mental illness. It will feel to them like a real, important relationship, one that offers a convincing replica of empathy and understanding and that, in some cases, feels just as good as the real thing.I wanted to experience that…

Cameron heard about Elliot’s death in the newsroom of The Hollywood Reporter, where she was working at the time: “I kicked into professional mode and said, no one else is going to write that obit. I’m going to do it.” She tracked down Carr by phone in Nilsson’s apartment. “He could barely speak,” Cameron recalled. She asked what happened, and he said he didn’t know. “‘Oh, wait,’” she recalled him saying. “‘I see a half-eaten ham sandwich on the night stand. That’s good. You tell everybody that she choked on a ham sandwich, do you understand me?’”“And I did it,”…

On the 15th night of Ramadan in a suburb of Belize City, Majid Khan and his family of four sat down for a traditional iftar meal to break the daylight hours fast. There was a leg of a lamb that Majid, a former Guantánamo detainee, had slaughtered himself, sweets brought by a sister in Maryland, dates from Saudi Arabia.The mood was a bit boisterous, but not enough to disrupt the sleep of baby Hamza, who was born two weeks earlier at a hospital in the Central American city. The talk was small, about whether the biryani dish was too spicy…

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised to build the Summer Olympics safely, free of the construction hazards and migrant worker abuses that tarnished soccer’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar.Months before the Games begin in Paris, he declared success.“We are living up to the commitments we made,” Mr. Macron said in February.Government data shows fewer than 200 injuries at Olympics sites over a four-year construction blitz. And no deaths.But inspection records and other documents show that Olympics sites have been more dangerous than organizers have let on, with some projects failing to meet basic safety standards. When undocumented immigrants are hurt on…