Author: NY TIMES

Of course there will be bagpipes on Saturday, the eve of Tartan Day, when Carnegie Hall will host a lineup of stars. Among the luminaries of Scottish traditional music will be Julie Fowlis, who was featured in the soundtrack to Disney’s “Brave”; and Dougie MacLean, the singer-songwriter whose “Caledonia” has became an anthem for Scottish sports fans.The event, “Scotland’s Hoolie in New York,” will also be the Carnegie Hall debut of an aging celebrity who flew into New York on Tuesday, accompanied by a personal bodyguard, before taking up residence at a high-security location on the Upper East Side. This…

The Israeli military pressed deeper into northern Gaza by ground on Friday after issuing a series of evacuation orders calling on Palestinians to flee, part of its escalating offensive against Hamas in the war-battered Gaza Strip.The expansion of ground operations came after the Palestinian health authorities said on Thursday that dozens of people, including children, were killed in Israeli strikes on a school turned shelter in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. On Friday, the Israeli military said the strikes were targeting well-known militants in a Hamas command and control center, without naming them.The evacuation orders have brought renewed hardship…

In the wake of President Trump unleashing a new series of tariffs that sent markets into a steep decline, a group of stars shoved into the Winter Garden Theater in Midtown Manhattan to see a play that lionizes the press, takes aim at right-wing politicians, and features actors talking about how they wake up in the morning unable to recognize the world around them.Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC were on the right side of the theater, a few rows behind Gayle King of CBS. Uma Thurman and Kylie Minogue hovered nearby.Even Jennifer Lopez was in the house, though…

A pungent smell of rotting garbage fills the air. Bulging sacks of trash pile high, some spilling their festering contents. And, with vermin plaguing parts of the city, at least one resident has claimed to have been bitten by a rat.With its heritage as a manufacturing powerhouse and its proud civic history, Birmingham likes to call itself Britain’s second city.Right now, it’s the nation’s garbage capital.A standoff between striking refuse workers and city officials has left an estimated 17,000 tons of trash piled on city streets that is attracting rats, foxes, cockroaches and maggots. On Monday, Birmingham’s municipality declared it…

John Thornton, a financier who leveraged his wealth and influence to embark on the seemingly quixotic mission of reviving local journalism in a time of crisis, by founding The Texas Tribune, a seminal regional nonprofit news organization, and the American Journalism Project, which supports local digital newsrooms around the country, died on Saturday in Austin, Texas. He was 59.His death, by suicide, followed a long mental health struggle, a spokesman for the American Journalism Project said.Mr. Thornton helped change the financial model for sustainable local journalism when, in 2009, he founded The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, digital-only, nonpartisan media organization.…

The year is 2027. Powerful artificial intelligence systems are becoming smarter than humans, and are wreaking havoc on the global order. Chinese spies have stolen America’s A.I. secrets, and the White House is rushing to retaliate. Inside a leading A.I. lab, engineers are spooked to discover that their models are starting to deceive them, raising the possibility that they’ll go rogue.These aren’t scenes from a sci-fi screenplay. They’re scenarios envisioned by a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., called the A.I. Futures Project, which has spent the past year trying to predict what the world will look like over the next few…

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced wide-ranging cutbacks at federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, that would eliminate duplicative services and paper pushers.But in interviews with more than a dozen current and former F.D.A. staff members, a different picture emerged of the far-reaching effects of the layoffs that would ultimately reduce the agency work force by 20 percent. Among them are experts who navigated a maze of laws to determine if an expensive drug can be sold as a low-cost generic; lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists…

Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.“Bruce lost this…

A 3½-year-old in Israel recently made an important archaeological discovery.The child, Ziv Nitzan, was hiking with her family last month on a dirt trail about 25 miles outside Jerusalem when a small rock caught her attention. She was drawn to it, she said in an interview translated from Hebrew by her mother, because “it had teeth on it.”Naturally, Ziv picked it up. When she rubbed off the dirt, “she noticed that it was something very special,” her mother, Sivan Nitzan, said.The alluring pebble turned out to be a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet, engraved with the design of an insect known as…

Imagine a ball pit — but one crowded with teens and 20-somethings instead of small children, and filled with biodegradable confetti instead of plastic spheres. That is one way to describe the scene on Saturday at a pop-up shop that Glossier, the American beauty brand, opened last week in Paris to promote the release of its latest fragrance, Fleur.In an area surrounded by purple mesh screens, visitors could plod through the purple confetti toward a tall pile of it, atop which sat a bottle of the new perfume. When a person grabbed the bottle from its perch, the action set…