Author: NY TIMES

Nine years ago, I moved in with my partner and her son. My two children, now 19 and 23, stayed with their mother, who lives two hours away. They visited us four days a month. My partner now objects to these visits: She says the kids are too old, too difficult — true, but not so much as to be relevant — and infringe on her privacy. I don’t think this is fair. We share all the costs of the house equally (mortgage, maintenance, utilities), and there’s plenty of space. I think my financial contributions entitle me to these visits.…

European leaders have gotten the message from Washington about doing more for their own defense and for Ukraine, too. They are talking tough when it comes to supporting Ukraine and about protecting their own borders, and they are standing up to a demanding and even hostile Trump administration.But there is an inevitable gap between talk and action, and unity is fracturing already, especially when it comes to spending and borrowing money in a period of low growth and high debt.The Dutch and others are not fans of raising collective debt for defense. Keeping Hungary on board is ever more difficult.And…

The 2025 WNBA Draft will be headlined by UConn’s Paige Bueckers, who has been regarded as top pick since she decided to execute her qualifications for the fifth year. But, besides the Bueckers, there are plenty of lead guards, scorers and wings eager to make an impact at the new level.The Bueckers and several of her draft picks, including Notre Dame and NC State Duos, are still in the NCAA Championship. UConn is seeking its first national title since 2016 and seeking its first title for the Bueckers. The rest is about to be finished, and the draft seems far…

The call of a conch shell roused the dolphin hunters from their beds. Under moonlight, the six men shuffled to the village church.There a priest led them in a whispered prayer, his voice barely audible over the sound of crashing waves; the tide was high that day. Saltwater pooled in parts of the village, which is on Fanalei Island, an ever-shrinking speck of land that is part of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.They paddled out in wooden canoes before first light, cutting through the darkness until they were miles away from shore. After hours of scanning the horizon,…

Hey, are you sure you want to send that to your group chat? Like, one thousand percent sure?Just checking. Because it’s been a strange week in the history of the group chat, those seemingly intimate text conversations that ping back and forth among friends and family members and, apparently, national security personnel.On Monday, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he had accidentally been added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal. He followed along as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out attack plans against Houthi strongholds in Yemen and watched other national…

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Martin A. Makary as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing two critics of the medical establishment to influential posts amid a Trump administration campaign to cut spending at health agencies.In a 56-to-44 vote, Dr. Makary was confirmed to lead an agency with broad regulatory authority over products including drugs and vaccines, putting him at the center of debates about the safety of the abortion pill and a wide range of inoculations.Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — 53 to 47, on a party-line…

For the Bronx crew ESG, another group formed by sisters — Renee Scroggins and her younger siblings Valerie, Deborah and Marie, along with a friend, Tito Libran — Lincoln Center was the far-off home of the New York Philharmonic, watched on PBS. Renee Scroggins, ESG’s frontwoman, said the show next month will be the first time she has set foot in the space. (ESG has performed at Carnegie Hall, and in arenas like Barclays Center, opening for Robyn, one of the many acts that followed in its sonic footprints.)ESG — it stands for emerald, silver and gold — was born…

The Israeli police questioned a Palestinian director of an Oscar-winning documentary on Tuesday, according to the authorities and his lawyer, after witnesses reported that Israeli settlers attacked him near his home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.The police were holding Hamdan Ballal, 37, one of the directors of the film, “No Other Land,” and two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones at Israeli vehicles and injuring a settler — accusations they all deny, according to Leah Tsemel, a lawyer representing the detainees.One settler, a minor, was also detained, but he was released for medical treatment and would be questioned later,…

After 45 years at Cambridge Typewriter Company, Tom Furrier is retiring and closing the shop.

Eric Schmieman worked for 15 years on the modern engineering equivalent of the Great Pyramid — building a giant protective shield for a damaged reactor at Chernobyl that would protect the world from further fallout from the worst ever nuclear disaster.The steel shell, slid into place over Reactor No. 4 on railroad tracks in 2016, is the world’s largest movable structure. It is as tall as a football field and weighs almost 40,000 tons. More than 45 countries and organizations spent almost $1.7 billion building it.“We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could…