Author: NY TIMES

Mr. Cannon, 37, said he knew early on that Ms. James, 30, “was someone I could see myself with.” On Nov. 7, which they consider their anniversary, he sent Ms. James a text asking her to be his girlfriend after leaving her apartment. She didn’t answer.The couple at the Afropunk Festival in 2016.Credit…Kevin Harry“I let him sweat a little,” said Ms. James, who wanted him to ask in person. “I felt a little weird about it,” said Mr. Cannon with a laugh. He was nervous but was confident in their connection. They became official — in person — later that…

The drones circled over the caves and crevices scattered around the mountain trails in northern Utah, feeding real-time video back to a search team on the ground looking for a missing hiker. Nineteen minutes later, they had her coordinates, bringing the rescue — a drill — closer to conclusion.“In this kind of environment, that’s actually pretty quick,” said Kyle Nordfors, a volunteer search and rescue worker. He was operating one of the drones, made by the Chinese company DJI, which dominates sales to law enforcement agencies as well as the hobbyist market in the United States.But if DJI’s drones are…

I don’t need help scheduling more things to do; I need to do less. Often these services suggest that users throw money at that problem (which is not very helpful if one of your problems is that you do not have enough money). The apps transform parents from workers into consumers, translating our to-do lists into shopping lists. Somebody is still performing our “joy-stealing” tasks, and it may be a call center worker or one of the many other invisible laborers who make artificial intelligence systems seem to run automatically.The boundary between the human and the artificial is slippery; Yohana…

You can always feel the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino trying to turn you on — he’s a zealous seducer. His movies are sleek divertissements about ravishing people and their often sumptuously rarefied sensibilities and worlds. I tend to like his work, even if it can be overly art-directed and feel too (excuse the verb) curated to stir the soul along with my consumer lust. I am moved when a father tenderly comforts his son in “Call Me by Your Name”; my most vivid memories of “A Bigger Splash” is its striking setting and a dress that Tilda Swinton wears.Guadagnino’s latest, “Challengers,”…

The World Anti-Doping Agency on Thursday appointed a special prosecutor to review how 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug were allowed to avoid public scrutiny and compete at the 2021 Olympics, where they won gold medals and set records.The decision to appoint the special prosecutor, Eric Cottier of Switzerland, came amid an outcry from top government officials, antidoping experts and authorities, and athletes over the way Chinese antidoping officials and the global regulator, known as WADA, handled the positives.WADA cast the move as one it had to make in response to “the damaging and baseless allegations…

A high school athletic director in the Baltimore area was arrested on Thursday after he used artificial intelligence software, the police said, to manufacture a racist and antisemitic audio clip that impersonated the school’s principal.Dazhon Darien, the athletic director of Pikesville High School, fabricated the recording — including a tirade about “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” — in an effort to smear the principal, Eric Eiswert, according to the Baltimore County Police Department.The faked recording, which was posted on Instagram in mid-January, quickly spread, roiling Baltimore County Public Schools, which is the…

While Congress says the social app is a security threat, critics of the law targeting it say it shows how out of step lawmakers are with young people. Source link

GUADAGNINO And yet you have an incredible capacity of observational reality. You know reality in a beautiful way, and you use it a lot in the way you then portray it.ZENDAYA While that’s true, I think I overly do it. I’m overly conscious of everything else around me.GUADAGNINO Because Z is a director. I told you many times, and I repeat it now to The Times.ZENDAYA I love being on set because it is not just creatively stimulating, but it’s one of the few places where I feel free. Whatever that thing in my brain is where it’s overly critical…

Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, on Thursday abruptly ended a coalition agreement between his Scottish National Party and the Scottish Green Party, creating a new set of challenges for an embattled leader whose party has been engulfed in a funding scandal since last year.A decision by the Scottish government to soften climate change targets, and a disagreement within the coalition over trans rights policies, had increased tension between the two parties, which have governed together since August 2021.But Mr. Yousaf’s decision to scrap the coalition appeared to take Lorna Slater, a co-leader of the Greens, by surprise on Thursday morning.…

The U.S. economy remained resilient early this year, with a strong job market fueling robust consumer spending. The trouble is that inflation was resilient, too.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down sharply from the 3.4 percent growth rate at the end of 2023 and fell well short of forecasters’ expectations.Economists were largely unconcerned by the slowdown, which stemmed mostly from big shifts in business inventories and international trade, components that often swing wildly from one quarter to…