Author: NY TIMES

Dear listeners,It’s finally April, which means it’s time for those proverbial showers. We’re enduring another dreary, drizzly week of gray skies here in New York, but I’ve found a silver lining in all the clouds. Rather than rage against the rain, I’ve decided to make it my muse for today’s playlist.Perhaps because enduring a drizzly day is such a universal experience, popular music is full of rain songs. Some (like a track here from the soul trio Love Unlimited) celebrate it, but most (the Carpenters, Ann Peebles) bemoan it, or at least see it as a metaphor for all kinds…

Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday pledged to avenge the deaths of three commanders and four officers in Iran’s armed forces, one day after they were killed in a precision Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus.The leaders, Iranian officials said, were some of the highest ranking leaders in the Quds Force, overseeing Iran’s covert intelligence and military operations in Syria and Lebanon. The strike was the deadliest against Iranian officials in recent memory and has shaken the country’s armed forces establishment. The strike, both the latest in a yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel and a seeming…

On Monday, Israel bombed a building that was part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, killing seven people, including Gen. Mohamad Reza Zahedi, who oversaw Iran’s covert military operations in Syria and Lebanon, and two other senior generals.For centuries, diplomatic premises have been afforded special protections. Diplomats get immunity from prosecution in their host country, and embassy buildings are often viewed as a “sanctuary” of sorts for their nation’s citizens — they cannot be entered by the host country’s police without the permission of diplomatic staff, and often become refuges for expatriates in times of war.So attacks on diplomatic…

‘Good Yezha’Yezha, my dad’s old dog, was missing one leg and all her teeth. Weeks before my son and I visited them in Warsaw, she stopped eating. My dad never let my childhood dog in the house. Yet, for Yezha, he’d fry naleśniki crêpes in butter and feed her the cheese filling when it cooled. He’d buy cabbage rolls at the grocery store, and we’d cheer when bites of meat stuffing made it past her gums. “Good Yezha,” we’d coo. My dad, twice divorced, grew up poor under communism. Wasting food was unthinkable. But he’d do anything to keep her…

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen will make her second trip to China this week for high-level talks aimed at further stabilizing the relationship between the world’s largest economies as political rancor in the United States intensifies ahead of the presidential election.During four days of meetings in Guangzhou and Beijing, Ms. Yellen plans to meet with representatives from American companies, Chinese students and professors, and China’s top economic officials. The trip comes as the Biden administration tries to balance a tougher stance toward China, including restricting access to American technology and retaining tariffs on billions of Chinese exports, while keeping regular…

For nearly 30 years, Oren Etzioni was among the most optimistic of artificial intelligence researchers.But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation online. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat.On Tuesday, the organization released free tools for identifying digital disinformation, with a plan…

The highly lethal form of avian influenza circulating the globe since 2021 has killed tens of millions of birds, forced poultry farmers in the United States to slaughter entire flocks and prompted a brief but alarming spike in the price of eggs.Most recently, it has infected dairy cows in several states and at least one person in Texas who had close contact with the animals, officials said this week.The outbreak, it turns out, is proving to be especially costly for American taxpayers.Last year, the Department of Agriculture paid poultry producers more than half a billion dollars for the turkeys, chickens…

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has been led for decades by conducting titans including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti, announced Tuesday that its next music director would be Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old Finnish conductor whose charisma and clarity have fueled his rapid rise in classical music.When he begins a five-year contract in 2027 at 31, Mäkelä will be the youngest maestro in the ensemble’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top orchestra in the United States.Mäkelä, who will become music director designate immediately, said in an interview that he did not think his…

President Biden spoke with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in a call on Tuesday morning that was aimed at addressing a wide range of combative and cooperative issues, as the United States grapples with wars and other global crises, according to a White House statement.The topics on Mr. Biden’s agenda included fighting narcotics production, the Middle East conflict and China’s support of Russia during the Ukraine war, a senior administration official said.Mr. Biden intended the talk to be a “check-in” rather than a summit with concrete outcomes, said the official, who spoke to a small group of reporters on Monday night…

Exploding drones hit an oil refinery and munitions factory far to the east of Moscow on Tuesday, in what Ukrainian media and military experts said was among the longest-range strikes with Ukrainian drones so far in the war.The drones struck in the Tatarstan region of Russia, about 700 miles from Ukrainian-held territory. Just a day earlier, a Ukrainian official had announced that the country’s domestically produced drones were now able to hit targets beyond 1,000 kilometers, or 621 miles.The targeted factory was built by Russia to produce its own arsenal of long-range attack drones that are based on an Iranian…