Author: NY TIMES

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…

The last six weeks have seen the long-simmering feud between the Compton, Calif.,-born rapper Kendrick Lamar and the Canadian rapper Drake turn into a full-fledged beef, with confrontations delivered in the form of diss tracks.But the squabble didn’t boil over until April 30, when Mr. Lamar released “Euphoria,” a six-and-a-half minute dressing down of the “Nice for What” rapper. On Friday, Drake replied to “Euphoria” and another track, “6:16 in L.A.,” with “Family Matters,” which has more than 15 million views on YouTube.Caught in the middle of this culture-consuming rivalry is New Ho King, an unassuming restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown.…

The Federal Aviation Administration has opened a new investigation into Boeing after the plane maker told the regulator that it might have skipped required inspections involving the wings of some 787 Dreamliners.In a statement on Monday, the F.A.A. said that it learned about the issue from Boeing last month. As part of its inquiry, the agency said it was looking into whether employees at the company may have falsified aircraft records.The F.A.A. said that Boeing was reinspecting all Dreamliners still in production and that the company needed to create a plan to address aircraft already in service.“As the investigation continues,…

The kookiest characters onscreen this season may be the ones played by Dan Stevens.This batch of charismatic weirdos joins the collection of peculiar roles he has amassed since the 2014 thriller “The Guest,” his post-“Downton Abbey” breakthrough. Stevens, 41, lands somewhere between leading man and character actor, and he revels in the mischievous tone required for these offbeat parts, some of which he describes as “funcomfortable.”Right now in theaters he can be seen as a winning monster veterinarian in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” and as a corrupt cop turned bloodsucker in the horror comedy “Abigail.” This summer, he…