Author: NY TIMES

Sometimes getting your art displayed at one of Europe’s finer museums is just a matter of hanging it there yourself.On Monday, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich reported a reverse heist of sorts: While it was closed to the public, an employee hung one of his own paintings among the museum’s modern art collection.The employee, who is 51, was helping to install an architecture exhibit on philanthropy that opened recently when he took a detour to the modern art floor to make the addition, according to the museum.“He was carrying tools, that’s why he went totally unnoticed,” said Tine Nehler,…

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Wedding accessories are often the unsung accents that play a pivotal role in enhancing a look. Cynthia Smith, a wedding stylist and owner of Cynthia Cook Brides in San Francisco Bay, believes that “accessories provide an opportunity for today’s bride to break the typically traditional mold by adding personality, sentimentality or a risqué quality all at once.”Accessories also have the ability to change one’s look completely, say from ceremony to cocktail, while adding a touch of personalization. “You’re adding an unexpected, potent element, usually that modernizes a traditional look, making an outfit more fashion forward,” said Ms. Smith, who is…

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Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on Friday warned of an “unsettling” global landscape, highlighting a cascade of pressures including war, rising geopolitical tensions and inflation that threaten the economy and could weigh on the performance of the nation’s largest bank.Mr. Dimon’s remarks, made concurrently with his bank’s quarterly earnings report — which showed weakness in some parts of the business — add to his litany of concerns about the U.S. economy as the Federal Reserve grapples with when or whether to lower interest rates, particularly in light of this week’s hotter-than-expected inflation data.“We have never truly experienced…

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Outrage over a strike by the Israeli military that killed seven aid workers in Gaza has supercharged resistance among congressional Democrats to sending arms and fresh military funding to Israel.The mounting concern has added uncertainty to a pending foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel that has been stalled in the House for months. It has also fueled calls by Democrats for the administration to stop sending Israel offensive weapons already in the pipeline, some of them for many years.Until recently, the $14.1 billion President Biden requested in the fall for Israel’s war against Hamas was regarded as a popular…

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Six months into the Israel-Hamas war, the people of Gaza are facing a hunger crisis that the United Nations says borders on famine.The crisis in Gaza is entirely human-made, a result of Israel’s war on Hamas and a near-complete siege of the territory, aid experts say. Conflicts were also at the root of the other two disasters in the last two decades that were classified by a global authority as famines, in Sudan and Somalia, though in those countries drought was a also significant underlying factor.Here’s a look at how Gaza reached this point.The food shortages in Gaza have been…

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AUGUSTA, Ga. – The 88th Masters is here, and with it comes the reintroduction of one of golf’s greatest and most historic courses: Augusta National Golf Club. What makes this event so iconic is not just its history, but the crucial role the course plays every April. It’s a major that returns to the same location every year, which means players and spectators alike know the course, its most famous holes and all the epic moments of greatness and failure that have occurred over the past nearly nine decades.But which holes actually decide the outcome of the Masters? Competitor Five…

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Night after night I went to work in the pit, a place where opera’s most common theme — love gone wrong — constantly unfolded onstage. Leonora chooses poison over a forced marriage. Madama Butterfly chooses seppuku over spousal humiliation. Senta throws herself into the sea as her Flying Dutchman departs.The stories didn’t help, but the music did.One of the operas in our rotation was “Der Rosenkavalier.” Near the end of the opera, the Marschallin and the two young lovers come together to sing about aging, love and loss. Their voices weave together and overlap; the inner lines, struggling to be…

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Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide.“Folks born in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the firm’s lobster processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy…

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Doses of cholera vaccine are being given to patients as fast as they are produced and the global stockpile has run completely dry, as deadly outbreaks of the disease continue to spread.This does not shock anyone in the field of emergency epidemic response because the vaccine stockpile has been precariously low for years.The surprise — the good news, which is in itself surprising since ‘cholera’ and ‘good news’ are rarely used together — is that three new vaccine makers are setting up production lines and joining the effort to replenish the stockpile.And a fourth company, the only one that currently…

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