Author: NY TIMES

Israeli officials increasingly believe that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for senior government officials on charges related to the conflict with Hamas, according to five Israeli and foreign officials.The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.If the court proceeds, the Israeli officials could potentially be accused of preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and pursuing an excessively harsh response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to two of the five officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of…

All that semiology, contained in a pair of trousers! Who could resist? They represented utilitarianism, rebellion, war, peace, masculinity, subversion, D.I.Y. practicality. Yves Saint Laurent was arguably the first designer to give cargo pants the high-fashion treatment, when he included a version in his Saharienne collection of 1968. Since then, it’s hard to think of a single label that hasn’t flirted with the style — on all ends of the fashion spectrum. Though they cycle up and down in popularity (big in the 1990s and noughties, less ubiquitous in the 2010s), they never disappear entirely. And at the moment they…

When Carrie Clark got a phone call on April 17 from a veterinarian in California informing her that her cat, which had vanished from her Utah home a week earlier, had been found some 500 miles away, her first reaction was disbelief.“I could not believe that it was true,” Ms. Clark said in an interview on Sunday night. “I told her: I think this is a prank.”It wasn’t. Galena, her 6-year-old American shorthair, had sneaked inside a 3-by-3-foot cardboard Amazon returns package alongside five pairs of steel-toed boots. Then the cat was transported two states away to one of the…

Mustafa Suleyman grew up in subsidized housing in one of London’s roughest areas. His father, a Syrian immigrant, drove a taxi. His mother was a nurse with the National Health Service. When the prestigious Queen Elizabeth’s School accepted him at the age of 11, the family moved into a safer, leafier neighborhood a few miles north.There, he met 20-year-old Demis Hassabis, after becoming friends with his younger brother. Demis was a chess prodigy and video game designer whose parents — one a Greek Cypriot, the other a Singaporean — ran a London toy store.Today, they are two of the most…

As diabetes and weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy took off in the last few years, many people turned away from established diet and nutrition products.Now, two retailers that specialize in nutritional supplements — GNC and the Vitamin Shoppe — are trying new approaches to win over people who are taking those drugs or who are interested in them.GNC is dedicating a wall of supplements in its more than 2,300 stores to products that it believes will appeal to people on Ozempic, which contains the compound semaglutide, and other drugs that are known as GLP-1 medicines. The chain is also…

Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison…

Like other governments across the Middle East, Egypt has not been shy about its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its denunciations of Israel over the war in Gaza are loud and constant. State media outlets broadcast images of long lines of aid trucks waiting to cross from Egypt into Gaza, spotlighting Egypt’s role as the sole conduit for most of the limited aid entering the besieged territory.Earlier this month, however, when hundreds of people gathered in downtown Cairo to demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza, Egyptian security officers swooped in, arresting 14 protesters, according to their lawyer. Back in October, the…

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain declared on Monday that he would not resign, nearly a week after publicly raising the possibility in response to corruption allegations against his wife that he and other officials denounced as a smear campaign.The decision by Mr. Sánchez, who has repeatedly astonished his supporters and frustrated his conservative critics with his knack for political survival, is a momentous one for him, his country and all of Europe.Mr. Sánchez inspired anxiety, bewilderment and right-wing hopes last week when he responded to the opening of a judicial investigation into his wife by canceling his public schedule…

Call it the end of the beginning of the A.I. boom.Since mid-March, the financial pressure on several signature artificial intelligence start-ups has taken a toll. Inflection AI, which raised $1.5 billion but made almost no money, has folded its original business. Stability AI has laid off employees and parted ways with its chief executive. And Anthropic has raced to close the roughly $1.8 billion gap between its modest sales and enormous expenses.The A.I. revolution, it is becoming clear in Silicon Valley, is going to come with a very big price tag. And the tech companies that have bet their futures…

Federal funding promises can shape how much, or how fast, provinces advance their own agenda items, and Alberta wants Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to know that his to-do list will have to wait.Premier Danielle Smith announced that the province would take steps, through a bill introduced this month, to reinforce the work that she contends is most important to Albertans and to her United Conservative Party government. This latest attempt to square off with the federal government in Ottawa continues to deepen her party’s view that Mr. Trudeau, a Liberal, has thrust his ideological agenda onto Albertans.“Albertans don’t want federal…