Author: NY TIMES

The largest luxury watch fair in Switzerland opens April 9 — just as the Swiss watch industry appears to be entering a slowdown.More than 45,000 visitors are expected to visit Watches and Wonders Geneva and its 54 exhibiting watch brands before the show closes April 15, just weeks after the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry announced that watch export values had fallen for the first time in two years, following a period of record revenues.Exhibitors said the show’s timing couldn’t be better.“In the market context, which is not as positive as last year, it’s a good opportunity to relaunch…

The Chinese company NetEase said on Wednesday that it had struck a deal to distribute titles from Microsoft’s Blizzard Entertainment, restoring access to popular video games like World of Warcraft for Chinese gamers.More than a year ago, NetEase and Blizzard called an end to their long-running partnership when renewal talks turned testy, with both sides accusing each other of bad-faith negotiations. An uproar ensued among Chinese gamers, upset about losing access to a slew of popular titles from Blizzard’s parent company, the U.S. game developer Activision Blizzard. NetEase said on Wednesday that it had reached the new deal with Microsoft,…

The thriller “Monkey Man” opens on a tender scene and a nod to the power of storytelling, only to quickly get down to down-and-dirty, action-movie business with a flurry of hard blows and faster edits. For the next two frenetic hours, it repeatedly cuts back to the past — where a mother and child happily lived once upon a bucolic time — before returning to the grubby, raw-knuckle present. There, the hits keep coming and the hero keeps taking them, again and again, in a movie that tries so hard to keep you entertained, it ends up exhausting you.Set largely…

In the fall of 2016, the Obama administration sealed a major military agreement with Israel that committed the United States to giving the country $38 billion in arms over 10 years.“The continued supply of the world’s most advanced weapons technology will ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself from all manner of threats,” President Barack Obama said.At the time, the agreement was uncontroversial. It was a period of relative calm for Israel, and few officials in Washington expressed concern about how the American arms might one day be used.Now that military aid package, which guarantees Israel $3.3 billion…

South Korea’s polarized electionSouth Koreans are heading to the polls today to ​select a new Parliament after a particularly fraught campaign. The general election, the first since President Yoon Suk-yeol won the presidency in 2022, is seen as a midterm referendum on his leadership.Voting was getting underway across the country, just as we sent this newsletter.Many parties are vying for 300 seats in the Parliament. But the election is largely a contest between Yoon’s conservative People Power Party and the main opposition group, the liberal Democratic Party, led by Lee Jae-myung. It has become a bitter contest between the two…

In the completed watch, the Chinese perpetual calendar boasts 11 functions and displays the date of the Lunar New Year for the next 20 years on a disk at 6 o’clock on the front dial. To identify the New Year date to 2200 was too much information for just one disk, so the brand made eight more disks, and a house watchmaker will have to change it every 20 years.The movement also includes a Gregorian perpetual calendar, said to be accurate to 2100, and a Chinese agricultural perpetual calendar, based on a solar calendar that divides the year into 24…

The United States Postal Service on Tuesday proposed an overall increase of nearly 8 percent on the price of postage, the latest in a series of stamp hikes over the past three years.The new prices would take effect in July, pending approval from an independent regulatory commission. Among other changes, a Forever stamp would cost 73 cents instead of 68 cents, and the price of a domestic postcard would rise to 56 cents from 53 cents.The proposed changes, like several others since 2021, are part of the service’s 10-year plan to raise prices and slow some deliveries, among other measures,…

Larisa Oleynik, who played Kat’s kid sister, Bianca, recalls rewatching “10 Things” recently. “The thing I love so much — and I’m going to get emotional — is, she’s so earnest,” Oleynik said. “She’s so genuine. And to me, that is the most beautiful thing about Julia’s portrayal of that character. It is coming from a deeply heartfelt, vulnerable, sensitive, insanely intelligent place,” she said, while adding: “I don’t think anyone else would have been able to be that real.”Stiles started acting as a 12-year-old in New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, but had a hard time finding her…

She attended the elite Holton-Arms School for girls in the suburbs outside Washington. On weekends she strolled with friends on shopping trips through the Tysons Corner Center mall in Northern Virginia. Three American secretaries of state — Colin L. Powell, James A. Baker and Madeleine Albright — were regular guests in her parents’ home.These days, Princess Reema Bandar al-Saud, 48, the daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, one of the most powerful diplomats in Washington when he was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States for more than two decades, occupies her father’s old job.It has not been easy.She landed…

Germany on Tuesday defended itself against accusations that its arms sales to Israel were abetting genocide in Gaza, arguing at the International Court of Justice that most of the equipment it has supplied since Oct. 7 was nonlethal and that it has also been one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.The case at the U.N. court in The Hague pits Germany, whose support for Israel is considered an inviolable part of the country’s atonement for the Holocaust, against Nicaragua, which brought the allegations to the court and is a longstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause.Debate over…