Author: NY TIMES

On the third floor of the Edition hotel in West Hollywood, three chairs were pushed against a wall in a hallway, supporting a rotating cast of entertainment journalists.The interviewers made hushed small talk, waiting for their turns with the director and star of “Back to Black,” a new film about the singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse.A British man disclosed that he’d dreaded the movie, as if watching it would give him war flashbacks. He once lived near Ms. Winehouse in London, and they shared mutual acquaintances.An American woman held a notecard with a question that read: “Muh reese uh” — the phonetic…

Billions in federal subsidies for semiconductor manufacturers are expected to help reverse a decades-long decline in America’s share of global chip manufacturing.The United States will triple its domestic chip manufacturing capacity by 2032, the largest increase in the world, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Boston Consulting Group. As a result, America’s share of world chip manufacturing is expected to rise for the first time in decades, to 14 percent by 2032, up from about 10 percent today.The report found that much of the industry’s growth would be fueled by the bipartisan…

Nine of the 10 wrongful death lawsuits that were filed after a stampede at the Astroworld music festival in 2021 have been settled, a spokeswoman for Live Nation confirmed on Wednesday after a court hearing about the latest agreement.Ten people were killed and hundreds more injured as a result of a large crowd surge during a performance by the rapper Travis Scott in Houston on Nov. 5, 2021. The suits alleged that Scott, who was the headliner, the concert promoter Live Nation and other defendants had contributed to the deaths through negligent planning and a lack of safety measures.A lawsuit…

The message was not getting through. Not through the phone calls or the emissaries or the public statements or the joint committee meetings. And so, frustrated that he was being ignored, President Biden chose a more dramatic way of making himself clear to Israeli leaders. He stopped sending the bombs.Mr. Biden’s decision to pause the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel was meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits. While insisting that his support for the Jewish state remains “ironclad,” Mr. Biden opted for the first time since the Gaza war erupted last fall to use…

Ukraine’s Parliament passed a bill on Wednesday that will allow some convicts to serve in the military in exchange for the possibility of parole at the end of their service, a move aimed at replenishing the army’s depleted ranks after more than two years of war.The bill must still be signed into law by President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was not immediately clear if he would do so, given the sensitivity of the matter.The policy echoes a practice used by Russia, which has committed tens of thousands of convicts to the war, allowing it to gain the upper hand in bloody…

The Unstoppables is a series about people whose ambition is undimmed by time. Below, George Takei explains, in his own words, what continues to motivate him.I was born April 20 of 1937. Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. I had turned 5 by the time a morning arrived that I can never forget. Two months after Pearl Harbor, in February 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, decreeing that all Japanese Americans — 125,000 of us by the latest count — on the West Coast were to be imprisoned with no charge, no trial and no due…

The New York Times Company gained 210,000 digital subscribers last quarter, largely users who signed up for a bundle of services including news, games and sports coverage through The Athletic, the company said on Wednesday.Adjusted operating profit for the three months was $76.1 million, an increase of 40.9 percent from a year earlier, propelled both by the increase in subscribers and by higher average revenue per user.“2024 is off to a strong start, as our results reflect the power of our strategy to be the essential subscription for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world,” Meredith…

General Motors said on Wednesday that it would stop making the Chevrolet Malibu, the last affordable sedan in its U.S. model lineup and a venerable nameplate that was introduced in the 1960s when the company was a dominant force in the U.S. economy.For years, American drivers have been gravitating toward sport utility vehicles and away from sedans, compacts and hatchbacks. G.M.’s two Detroit rivals, Stellantis and Ford Motor, have also largely wiped their slates clean of cars in the United States.Foreign automakers such as Toyota, Honda and Hyundai still sell hundreds of thousands of sedans and compacts each year, but…

Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet — including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species — are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study.Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America.But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these…

Cole Swain was scrolling through his phone one morning before school last week when he received an alert from YouTube. It was 8:24 a.m. in Los Angeles, where Mr. Swain is a university student, and Kendrick Lamar had just released “Euphoria,” a highly anticipated diss track targeting Drake in the escalating showdown between the two rappers.As Mr. Swain’s group chats and social media feeds blew up, he logged onto Genius, a website where users can transcribe and annotate lyrics to help explain their meaning. A volunteer editor for the site and a fan of Lamar’s, Mr. Swain was ready to…