Author: NY TIMES

The clock ticks for TikTok The push to either split TikTok from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or ban it in the U.S. is gaining momentum thanks to a legislative maneuver by the House Speaker Mike Johnson.The bill’s progress comes as The Times reveals more details about the video platform’s origin story — and the central role played by the Chinese subsidiary of the trading firm of a Republican donor, Jeff Yass.Johnson has bundled the TikTok bill into a foreign aid package. The speaker said on Wednesday that he would put up for a vote this weekend a spending measure for…

For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel shows her hand when a character says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the madness we’re about to witness “happened so long ago.”The movie is set in summer 2020.Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender massage therapist in New York, and the first of the film’s two narrators. Her opinion of white gay male privilege, especially that of her best friend Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, can be stinging.“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown in the brownstone of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Leo (John Roberts). Upstairs, Coco…

A relentless deluge of rain battered the United Arab Emirates and Oman this week, killing at least 20 people, causing scores of delays and cancellations at Dubai’s airport and bringing other cities to a standstill in what experts have described as a weather system supercharged by climate change.The storm first hit Oman on Sunday, killing 19 people as it caused widespread flash flooding and turned streets into raging rivers in Muscat, the capital. In the U.A.E., which experienced its largest rainfall in 75 years, one person died in the city of Ras Al-Khaimah and the authorities urged residents to remain…

In the past year, jihadists from Tajikistan have been involved in an unusually high number of terrorist attacks or foiled plots linked to the Islamic State.The suspects in the storming of a concert hall near Moscow last month were Tajiks. Before that, Tajiks staged bloody assaults in Iran and Turkey, while several schemes in Europe said to involve Tajiks were thwarted.Hundreds of men from Tajikistan — a small, impoverished country in Central Asia controlled by an authoritarian president — have joined an affiliate of the Islamic State in Afghanistan known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, analysts say.They…

“Is he clean, or does he have a girlfriend?”That’s the question Lizzie Kane asked herself while on a fourth date at the home of a man she was seeing.After finishing a filet mignon dinner he had prepared, she excused herself to his bathroom, where she was met with a mix of niche, luxury skin care brands sitting on his counter and hanging on his shower rail — the kind of products, she believed, that would be unusual for a straight man to have. At least, not without the help of a woman.Bewildered, she captured the scene on video before confronting…

In 2009, long before Jeff Yass became a Republican megadonor, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, invested in a Chinese real estate start-up that boasted a sophisticated search algorithm.The company, 99Fang, promised to help buyers find their perfect homes. Behind the scenes, employees of a Chinese subsidiary of Mr. Yass’s firm were so deeply involved, records show, that they conceived the idea for the company and handpicked its chief executive. They said in one email that he was not the company’s “real founder.”As a real estate venture, 99Fang ultimately fizzled. But it was significant, according to a lawsuit by former Susquehanna…

After former President Donald J. Trump was kicked off Twitter in 2021, conservative entrepreneurs rushed to promote social media alternatives tailored to him and his supporters.There were Parler and Gab, Twitter-like sites popular among the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Then came Gettr, a social media app created by one of Mr. Trump’s former advisers.That crowded field has now narrowed, giving an edge to Truth Social, the platform that Mr. Trump’s company owns and where he is the main attraction.In March, Truth Social recorded 1.5 million unique visitors in the United States as its parent company…

In the early days of the Covid pandemic, a team of scientists called on the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the disease could spread through the air.Initially, the agency rebuffed them, despite growing evidence that coronavirus-laden droplets stuck around in the air, making indoor spaces hotbeds of infection. The researchers responded with a public campaign, which helped persuade the World Health Organization to finally acknowledge, in late 2021, that Covid was airborne.In the wake of the controversy, the agency also asked a group of advisers — including some of its scientific critics — to update its formal guidelines for…

On a recent Tuesday night in a dressing room of the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, Annie Clark, the 41-year-old musician who records as St. Vincent, thumbed through a shelf of secondhand records and sipped a glass of pink champagne. Clark, invited to D.J. the venue’s grand reopening party, was the room’s first inhabitant since a major renovation restored the former movie palace; a pristine, new-car smell lingered.Holding court among a few members of her team and her 23-year-old sister, Clark was an attentive host in this antiseptic space, ready with a witty remark (the carefully curated LPs were probably “someone’s deceased…

The mother of one of the suspects in the bloody attack on a concert hall near Moscow last month wept as she talked about her son.How, she wondered, did he go from the bumpy, dirt roads of their village in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, to sitting, bruised and battered, in a Russian courtroom accused of terrorism? Even though he spent five years in Tajik prisons as a teenager, she said he never exhibited signs of violent extremism.“We need to understand — who is recruiting young Tajiks, why do they want to highlight us as a nation of terrorists?” said the…