Author: NY TIMES

The American investment firm 777 Partners, whose bid to buy the English Premier League soccer team Everton has been on hold for months amid doubts about the company’s finances, was accused by one of its lenders on Friday of running a yearslong fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars.The accusation came in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in New York by Leadenhall Capital Partners, a London-based asset management company. It said that it had provided 777 Partners with more than $600 million in financing, only to discover that roughly $350 million in assets serving as collateral for…

Josh Friesen, 33, who works in marketing and communication and lives in Portland, Ore., said he was comfortable giving his children, 8 and 4, mocktails at home. “Every now and then I will whip up something that either has Lacroix or kombucha, and I’ll put a little cocktail cherry and make it fancy with a toothpick and a lime wedge,” he said.But he doesn’t let them order them in restaurants.“I feel like these places that make these nonalcoholic spirits and these places that serve mocktails, they don’t do it for kids,” he said. “I don’t want my kid co-opting this…

Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance has been the most tumultuous media deal in years. Now it has taken yet another turn after the exclusivity period for negotiations expired without an agreement in hand.A month ago, a special committee of Paramount’s board agreed to enter into exclusive talks with Skydance — a Hollywood studio run by the tech scion David Ellison — even as the private equity giant Apollo Global Management reached out with a $26 billion offer. Paramount shareholders grumbled that granting exclusivity was a mistake, and that the company should have engaged with Apollo instead.This week, the special committee…

Not a lot of Lincoln Center Theater shows call for setting the preperformance mood with the Grateful Dead, but when “Uncle John’s Band” came over the speakers the other evening before the Bengsons took the stage, it was such an ideal match for their crunchy, mellow, kindhearted, folk-rock vibe that I had to smile.In Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s “The Keep Going Songs,” though, it’s the dead with a lowercase “d” who are integral. This married couple of music-makers, known for shaggy, melodic, autobiographically inspired theater, wanted to create what they call “a concert. That’s also a wake.”Directed by Caitlin Sullivan…

The director of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, says that parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a “full-blown famine” that is rapidly spreading throughout the territory after almost seven months of war.Ms. McCain is the second high-profile American leading a U.S. government or U.N. aid effort who has said that there is famine in northern Gaza, although her remarks do not constitute an official declaration, which is a complex bureaucratic process.“There is famine — full-blown famine in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” said Ms. McCain in an interview on Meet The Press on Friday. The…

It was still early on Thursday evening at Casa Cipriani in downtown Manhattan, but Lionel Richie thought he knew how his night would end: “Buckingham Palace is going to call us and ask, ‘How did it go?’”Mr. Richie, who had just walked a red carpet and was getting bombarded with selfie requests, was co-hosting the King’s Trust Global Gala, a fund-raiser for the organization started in 1976 by then Prince Charles that helps millions of underserved youth globally.The night drew more than 300 people including the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Drew Barrymore, the musician John Legend, the stylist Law Roach…

Something was very wrong with Jackie Kirks’s food stamp card.While standing at the checkout line in a cavernous Albertsons grocery store in Long Beach, Calif., last December, Ms. Kirks was told that she didn’t have enough money in her account to pay for food.“That’s impossible,” she told the cashier.Ms. Kirks, 70, knew that she had saved up a sizable sum in monthly benefits from the federal food assistance program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Until September, she had been homeless, bouncing between weeklong stays at motels and sleeping in her car. To eat, she would…

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, blindsided competitors, suppliers and his own employees this week by reversing course on his aggressive push to build electric vehicle chargers in the United States, a major priority of the Biden administration.Mr. Musk’s decision to lay off the 500-member team responsible for installing charging stations, and to sharply slow investment in new stations, baffled the industry and raised doubts about whether the number of public chargers would grow fast enough to keep pace with sales of battery-powered cars. It put the onus on other charging companies, raising questions about whether they can build…

Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand…

The Russian Army is gradually expanding the role of women as it seeks to balance President Vladimir V. Putin’s promotion of traditional family roles with the need for new recruits for the war in Ukraine.The military’s stepped-up appeal to women includes efforts to recruit female inmates in prisons, replicating on a much smaller scale a strategy that has swelled its ranks with male convicts. Recruiters in military uniforms toured Russian jails for women in the fall of 2023, offering inmates a pardon and $2,000 a month — 10 times the national minimum wage — in return for serving in frontline…