Author: NY TIMES

Who wouldn’t grab an income tax refund if they had one coming?About 940,000 people, it turns out — because they haven’t filed returns for the 2020 tax year, even though they may be due money back for that year. But there’s still close to a month left to file and collect the refunds. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the typical refund for the people in this group is more than $900.“There’s money remaining on the table for hundreds of thousands of people who haven’t filed 2020 tax returns,” the I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel Werfel, said in a statement. The deadline…

Palestinians in the West Bank on Sunday went on a general strike to protest an Israeli military raid at a refugee camp a day earlier in which at least 10 people were killed, in an episode that illustrated the continuing unrest in the territory.The raid was the latest operation in a sweeping economic and security clampdown in the territory occupied by Israel, even as it prosecutes its war against Hamas in Gaza. Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and detained in raids in the West Bank, which Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism…

The authorities in Poland and Germany have arrested at least five of their citizens in recent days and accused them of spying for Russia or of offering to help Moscow commit violence on European soil, including a “possible attack” on the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.The arrests underscored fears of the Kremlin’s furtive network in the West and its use of foreign nationals, including violent criminals and soccer hooligans, to terrify or possibly even kill opponents sheltering abroad.The Polish National Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement that a Polish citizen, identified as Pawel K., was detained on Wednesday. It said…

In 2022, several months after Joseph Barreto retired as a high school guidance counselor in East Harlem, he got a keepsake gift: a 42-millimeter stainless steel Omega Constellation watch with a grayish-taupe dial and prominent date display.But getting the timepiece wasn’t as straightforward as, say, walking into Omega’s Fifth Avenue boutique. Instead, the Hackensack, N.J., resident traveled to Switzerland to buy it.“Buying a watch in Europe is just a whole other experience,” said Mr. Barreto, 57. “They sit you down; there’s Champagne, there’s chocolate. It’s just an event.”Many of the former students Mr. Barreto worked with over his 34-year career…

“Hello, my name is Craig Carton, with you for another 30 minutes for a frank, open conversation about gambling addiction.”Seated alone in the WFAN radio studio in Lower Manhattan where he rose to fame, collapsed in ignominy and later rose again, Mr. Carton began his weekly show the same way he has in the three years since he got out of prison.On the line this morning in January was Rob D., a 61-year-old recovering gambling addict who got his start flipping cards in school before he went broke betting on basketball as an adult. Within minutes, Rob was weeping.Tears are…

The revelation that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned drug seven months before the Tokyo Olympics but were secretly cleared and allowed to continue competing has exposed a bitter and at times deeply personal rift inside the fight to keep drugs out of international sports, and brought new criticism of the global authority that oversees drug-testing.A New York Times investigation uncovered previously unreported details of the 2021 episode, in which a contingent of Chinese swimmers, including nearly half of the team that China sent to the Tokyo Games, tested positive for a banned prescription heart medicine that can…

Mr. Doctorow noted that, just as the internet has made routine tasks less burdensome, it has also made scams much easier to pull off. Picture an old-school boiler room in which fast-talking con artists place hundreds of phone calls in an effort to fleece strangers out of their savings, he said. Now fast forward to 2024, when scammers can send out millions of phishing texts and emails with the help of bots.“If you can automate parts of it,” Mr. Doctorow said, “you can cast a much wider net.”Text scams tricked Americans out of $300 million in 2022, the Federal Trade…

When Ana Jimena Barba, a young doctor, began working at a hospital in Madrid last year, she moved in with her parents half an hour outside the city until she could save enough to buy her own home. But when she started looking at houses in the same village, almost everything was priced at more than 500,000 euros.The amount — nearly 20 times more than the average annual salary in Spain — happens to correspond to the cost of the country’s “golden visa,” a program that offers residency to wealthy foreigners who buy real estate there. After a decade, the…

The Ukrainian lieutenant was at a firing position on the eastern front, commanding an artillery unit relying on American-provided M777 howitzers and other big guns, as U.S. lawmakers gathered in Washington to decide if his cannons would be forced to go silent for lack of ammunition.But when the lieutenant returned to his base on Saturday night, he got the news that he and millions of Ukrainians had been praying to hear.“I had just entered the building after a shift change when the guys informed me that the aid package for Ukraine had finally been approved by Congress,” said the lieutenant,…

Bill Bradley, the basketball Hall of Famer and former United States senator known as a staunch opponent of legalized sports betting, was speaking about the topic back in January. But he might as well have been predicting the future.“Well there hasn’t been a scandal, yet,” he said, discussing how professional sports has become ever more entwined with the gambling industry in recent years. “So the worst has been avoided, but all of the conditions are there for the untoward to occur.”On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association confirmed the untoward had occurred, issuing a lifetime ban to Jontay Porter, a seldom-used…