Author: NY TIMES

Israeli authorities have improved aid delivery to Gaza but still “need to do more,” President Biden said on Wednesday, offering a measured assessment of how well Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is living up to promises he made last week.In a call with Mr. Netanyahu last Thursday, Mr. Biden said that the United States could withhold support for Israel over its conduct of the war against Hamas, unless it did more to protect civilians and ensure adequate supplies for Gaza. On Wednesday, he said he had been “blunt and straightforward” with the Israeli leader.Since then, Mr. Biden said, Israel has done…

I love writing, I love acting, going onstage and doing my little one-woman show, and I refuse to be defined by a number, by an age. I think that’s terribly old-fashioned and not relevant in today’s world.But you have to be resilient in this business. Rejection is a part of it. I look with dismay at so many of my fellow actors, fallen by the way because of drink and drugs. My father — he was a theatrical agent — instilled in me that I should develop skin like a rhinoceros, and be like a marshmallow on the inside.You also…

President Biden said on Wednesday that he still expected the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates this year despite a re-acceleration in price growth across the economy, though he said new data suggested that cut might be pushed to later in the year.“I do stand by my prediction that before the year is out, there will be a rate cut,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference alongside Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, after the two of them met at the White House.“This may delay it a month or so — I’m not sure of that,” Mr. Bide said.…

Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to…

By contrast, U.N. data shows that a total of 533 aid trucks entered Gaza in the three days after Saturday. More broadly, U.N. figures show no increase in the daily average of trucks going into Gaza in the first week of April, compared to the previous week.The reasons for the discrepancy are not clear, but one is the differing methods Israel and the United Nations use to track trucks, said Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian office.Trucks screened — and counted — by Israel at the two working border crossings usually enter Gaza only half full, after Israeli…

A landmark bill set to overhaul migration policy across the European Union cleared its final hurdle on Wednesday after it was approved by the European Parliament.The bill, which had taken the best part of the past decade to negotiate, aims to make it easier for member states to deport failed asylum seekers and to limit the entry of migrants into the bloc. It would also give governments greater control over their borders, while bolstering the bloc’s role in migration management — treating it as a European issue, not one member states have to face alone.European officials and politicians had been…

Things have been tough in Britain lately. A cost of living crisis, soaring rents and economic recession. Illness at Buckingham Palace and the fracturing of the national service.But the so-called disunited kingdom was brought together last week in collective horror and mild revulsion. The catalyst? Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who opted to wear a box fresh pair of white Adidas Sambas during a Downing Street interview to promote his tax policies.Sambas, which trace their roots back to an Adi Dassler design from 1949, have more recently been hailed as the favorite shoe of Harry Styles, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and…

Wall Street was rattled by signs of stubborn inflation on Wednesday, with stock prices sliding and government bond yields, which underpin interest rates throughout the economy, jolting higher.The S&P 500 fell over 1 percent for the second time this month and only the fifth time this year. Other major indexes, including the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies, also fell.The sharp moves followed a consumer inflation report that came in hotter than expected, with prices rising 3.5 percent in March from a year earlier, marking another month of stubbornly high inflation. That made it harder…

After her second child was born, Chelsea Becker took an unpaid, yearlong leave from her full-time job as a flight attendant. After watching a video on TikTok, she found a side hustle: training artificial intelligence models for a website called Data Annotation Tech.For a few hours every day, Ms. Becker, 33, who lives in Schwenksville, Pa., would sit at her laptop and interact with an A.I.-powered chatbot. For every hour of work, she was paid $20 to $40. From December to March, she made over $10,000.The boom in A.I. technology has put a more sophisticated spin on a kind of…

The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising.For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, was the threshold because, in a time before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it was the clearest sign that a woman was pregnant.Before that point, “women could try to obtain an abortion without having to fear that it was illegal,” said…