Author: NY TIMES

In the age of Ozempic, the “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith is inspiring and infuriating her followers. Source link

Torrential rain battered Southern China on Sunday, causing flooding and forcing tens of thousands of evacuations in the country’s most populous province, as a waterspout appeared briefly in Hong Kong and forecasters warned of potentially severe flooding.Rain has been falling in Guangdong, which has a population of about 127 million people, since last week. It intensified over the weekend, hammering the north of the province and the Pearl River Delta in the south, which includes Guangdong’s capital, Guangzhou, as well as the cities of Hong Kong and Macau.The city of Yingde, in Guangdong’s north, received nearly a foot of rain…

For his 73rd birthday in April, Felice Macchi had lunch at La Bettola Del Gusto, a restaurant in Pompeii, Italy, with a focus on seafood.He ordered the house specialty: spaghettoni, a thicker spaghetti, in a fermented anchovy sauce with black truffles and butter made with milk from water buffalo native to the Mediterranean region. The meal came on a ceramic plate with a whimsical hand-painted design depicting the spaghettoni dish and a smoking volcano, a nod to nearby Mount Vesuvius.Mr. Macchi finished his meal — he said it was “excellent” — but did not leave the restaurant empty-handed. Instead of…

David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, received $49.7 million in compensation last year, a 26 percent increase from the previous year, according to a proxy statement filed on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.It is common for chief executives in media to receive lavish pay packages. Mr. Zaslav’s compensation for 2023 is notable, however, because Warner Bros. Discovery is not exactly a portrait of health. Losses totaled $3 billion in 2023, which was actually an improvement from $7 billion in losses the year before. Revenue fell 4 percent, largely because of the company’s atrophying cable television…

Wesselman-Pierce lived with her husband, Vince Pierce, and his two sons. “I didn’t want to lose the friendship no matter what,” a teary Wesselman-Pierce told Schulman in the film. “A lot of the personalities that came out were just fragments of myself.”At the end of the documentary, a ruminative Pierce recalled a tale he’d heard, and in turn, gave the movie — and the expression — its name. Cod, he said, were once shipped by boat in vats from Alaska to China, but the fish would arrive mushy and tasteless. Eventually catfish were added to the vats to keep the…

Few British politicians have American ties as deep as those of David Lammy, who is set to become Britain’s foreign secretary if the opposition Labour Party wins the coming election, as the polls suggest it will.A son of Guyanese immigrants who grew up poor in working-class London, he spent summers with relatives in Brooklyn and Queens, working at Con Edison, before earning a master’s degree at Harvard Law School and befriending Barack Obama, for whom he canvassed in Chicago during his first presidential campaign.Yet now, on the cusp of becoming Britain’s chief diplomat, Mr. Lammy finds himself facing an uncertain,…

China’s car shipments to foreign markets have quintupled in the past four years. Its solar panels dominate global markets. Even exports in labor-intensive industries like furniture making, which China was once expected to lose to lower-wage countries, are surging.American and European leaders have become increasingly vocal that a flood of Chinese exports is swamping their markets. Developing countries like India and Brazil are joining them in starting to put limits on purchases from China. Rich and poor countries alike fear that many of their factories may need to close, unable to compete with newer, more automated ones in China.But China’s…

Whenever a suspicion of doping arises in an Olympics, attention can shift quickly from the athletes who won gold, silver and bronze medals to the ones who missed out.On Saturday, The New York Times published an investigation into an unreported case in which 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for a powerful banned drug in 2021, only months before the Tokyo Olympics. The swimmers — who made up about half of the Chinese swimming team at those Games — were cleared by China’s antidoping authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency and allowed to compete.The episode has not only alarmed experts…

Michael Abramowitz will be the next director of the federally funded broadcaster Voice of America, its parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, announced on Friday.Mr. Abramowitz, 60, is currently the president of Freedom House, a pro-democracy nonprofit organization, a role he has held since 2017. He was previously a director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and spent 24 years as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post.Voice of America, which was founded in 1942, aims to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world. Mr. Abramowitz said he is drawn to the outlet’s global reach and its…

There was never much doubt that the Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” was going to be on Broadway. Keys spent 12 years developing a loosely autobiographical jukebox of her songs, incorporating such hits as “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “No One.”The problem is that while it played to sold-out crowds, the show that premiered at the Public Theater in November had herky-jerky pacing, a few too many groan-inducing scenes, and a second act that lost sight of whatever point the story was trying to make. (In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green pointed out that, after the…