Author: NY TIMES

As gold surged this year to its highest price ever, Xena Lin joined the frenzy by making monthly purchases of gold “beans,” pebble-like morsels of the precious metal.For Ms. Lin, a 25-year-old administrative worker in southern China, the $80 beans — small enough to rest on a fingertip and weighing about one-thirtieth of an ounce — were an affordable way to buy into the gold excitement without splurging for jewelry, gold bars or coins. She had dabbled with investing in stocks in the past, but she said buying gold, especially in this fun way, inspired her to continue investing.“I’m still…

Organizers at Hard Rock Stadium near Miami have hosted some of the biggest spectacles in American sports in the past five years, including the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.Now they want to turn the Miami Grand Prix, the Formula 1 race being held on a serpentine racetrack around the stadium on Sunday, into appointment viewing like the Kentucky Derby and the Masters are.Tom Garfinkel, the race’s managing partner, said that the city’s tropical locale and reputation as a party center were important facets, and that organizers were intentionally infusing the entertainment lineup with regional music, including Latin…

When Naji Fateel was arrested in the aftermath of Bahrain’s Arab Spring uprising, his youngest son, Nidal, was a toddler.Last month, when Mr. Fateel left prison — riding a bus filled with inmates freed by a surprise royal pardon — the Nidal who greeted him was a teenager. Mr. Fateel, 49, a human rights activist, embraced his son and emerged, dazed, into a life forever changed.“It was an indescribable moment,” he said, “the first hug after freedom.”After more than a decade in jail, Mr. Fateel was released in a mass pardon in April that included more than 1,500 prisoners —…

Once a powerful local Congolese leader, Lusinga Iwa Ng’ombe fought back against Belgian colonial invaders in the late 19th century.He was such a thorn in their side that Émile Storms, who commanded Belgian troops in the region, predicted his head would “eventually end up in Brussels with a little label — it would not be out of place in a museum.”That is exactly what happened. Troops of Mr. Storms killed and decapitated Mr. Lusinga in 1884, and his skull ended up in a box in the Brussels-based Institute for Natural Sciences, along with over 500 human remains taken from former…

Mystik Dan won the 150th Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.He beat out Team Sierra Leone and Team Forever Young in the photography competition. The crowd at Churchill Downs cheered as the three horses crossed the track, then fell silent as no one could narrowly tell who had won the race. Wow. 😱 Mystik Dan wins the 150th Kentucky Derby in photos! pic.twitter.com/N2jfd2TsKe — NBC Sports (@NBCSports) May 4, 2024Mystik Dan, who entered the race at odds of 18/1, took the lead in the final leg and saw his lead shrink in the final furlong…

It was not exactly urgent to get the rug, but the larger question the rug had to answer was urgent enough. That’s why, on a bright afternoon at the end of March, Miranda July and I were driving toward Irvine, Calif., where she planned to meet a man about a listing on Facebook Marketplace.She had recently moved out of the large home she shared with her husband and child in Silver Lake and into a small two-bedroom house behind her writing studio in Echo Park. It meant she needed new things for a new place. A toilet, for example. A…

Near the end of 2022, Lucas Bolt, an environmental artist and Lego enthusiast in Amsterdam, was working on a design for a Lego set the company had crowdsourced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game.“I spent two very intense weeks working on it, every night, every weekend, all the time that I had,” he said.Mr. Bolt was hoping to create the design for Lego Ideas, a program the toymaker started in 2008 to solicit ideas online directly from fans. Typically, designers post their concept on the platform, and if a design gets 10,000 votes,…

Some Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not…

“One of the great things about getting older is that if you’re lucky enough, you get to work with some of the same people over and over again,” the actress Laura Linney said. “It’s my favorite, favorite thing to do.”Ethan Hawke is one of those colleagues on repeat. Their relationship began with what she called a rather famously bad production of “The Seagull” in 1992.Linney was thrilled, then, when Hawke asked her to play Flannery O’Connor’s mother, Regina, in his new film “Wildcat.”“We’ve watched each other struggle and succeed and do well and be in pain,” Linney said. “There’s a…

Sadiq Khan, the two-term center-left mayor of London, on Saturday became the first three-time winner of the job by a comfortable margin delivering a new setback to Britain’s governing Conservative Party ahead of a looming general election.Mr. Khan, from the main opposition Labour Party, was initially elected to the post in 2016, becoming London’s first Muslim mayor, and is now the first politician to win three consecutive terms since the role was created in 2000.With the Labour Party well ahead in the opinion polls ahead of a looming general election, many analysts had expected Mr. Khan to cruise to a…