Author: NY TIMES

Printemps, a French department store that just opened its first American outpost in Lower Manhattan, is aiming to do what few stores of its ilk have lately done in that area: stay in business.The store at 1 Wall Street, about a five-minute walk from The New York Stock Exchange, is in a part of Manhattan that has recently had a poor track record with luxury retail emporiums. That may be why a marketing campaign emphasizes that it is “not a department store.”Saks Fifth Avenue’s store in the Brookfield Place mall was open for little more than two years before it…

When it comes to confronting global conflicts, President Trump is a man in a hurry.Even before his inauguration, the president claimed credit for what he called an “EPIC cease-fire” in Gaza. He has raced to get Ukraine and Russia to quickly embrace a pause in fighting. And with Iran, Mr. Trump wants an agreement within two months to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.It is the foreign policy version of the president’s “flood the zone” approach in Washington, where he and his lieutenants have used blitzkrieg-like tactics to dismantle the bureaucracy, consolidate executive power and attack his political enemies.…

Some lawyers said the deal was driven by profit. Others said it was enabling autocracy. One said the move had prompted her to quit her legal job in disgust.All over the legal world, lawyers on Friday were talking about the deal that Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, had made with President Trump to escape an onerous executive order that would have prevented it from representing many clients before the federal government. To avoid the hit to its business, the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for causes favored by the…

On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency, it said, would “move out aggressively” to improve efficiency, with an “initial objective” of cutting the work force to 2019 levels.The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “reduction in force” memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: Some 80,000 jobs would be cut.Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered,…

Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.Still debated today, Dr. McCully’s theory was that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine in the blood, hardening the…

Invited onto Tokyo’s jazz circuit, he sat in on “incredibly moving” gigs with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones in 1979 and ’81. (Shimizu’s bebop phrasings can be heard in “L’Automne à Pékin,” his electronic revamp of the American songbook, from 1983.) He also formed lifelong partnerships with Sakamoto (who died in 2023) and with touring regulars like the bassist Bill Laswell, who enlisted Shimizu into often raucous free improv sessions at the Shinjuku Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz club. “He has a voice,” Laswell said in a phone interview.In Japan, the cello suites made Shimizu’s reputation. The American composer Carl…

The Israeli defense minister tried on Friday to turn up the pressure on Hamas to release more hostages, saying Israel was preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.The remarks by the defense minister, Israel Katz, came days after a cease-fire that had been in place for more than two months was shattered with a renewed Israeli bombardment and more limited ground operations inside Gaza. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since Israel restarted attacks on Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which…

As Franck Verhaeghe and two friends planned a March trip to Mexico City, they plotted out not only where they would stay and which museums they would visit but also the language they would speak: French. “It’s not that I think it’s unsafe for Americans,” said Mr. Verhaeghe, 65, who lives in California, but “I can imagine people there aren’t very happy with us. So my friends and I decided that on this trip, we would all just speak French to each other.”Two months into his second term, President Trump has set off panic in Europe about the potential collapse…

London’s Heathrow Airport was closed for all of Friday, shutting down one of the world’s busiest airports and causing worldwide travel disruptions after it lost power because of a fire nearby.The closure disrupts an important travel hub for Britain, Europe and the world. Daily, an average of more than 220,000 passengers traveled through the airport last year on flights offered by 90 airlines to more than 180 destinations around the globe.On Friday morning, planes were scheduled to arrive from as far away as Vietnam, India and Brunei, and passengers were expecting to take off for destinations like Tokyo, New York…

LOS ANGELES – USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb and her star player Juju Watkins were invited to the annual Los Angeles Dodger Foundation Blue Diamond Dinner in May. In a world of la glitterati, Gottlieb was flocked by many people. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and boss Mark Walter want to see her. Magic Johnson and his wife Cookie came over. Part of the Los Angeles Lakers is also interested.Gottlieb said: “I was spinning everywhere, these fans and these guys went, ‘juju! juju!”’ “She was like any Dodgers (her) bread (hair style) that was recognizable and was the biggest star. I’m back…