Author: NY TIMES

The 12-year-old boy who opened fire at his school in Finland on Tuesday, killing a schoolmate and injuring two others, has offered an explanation for the shooting: He was bullied.The police said the motive emerged during interviews with the student, who had transferred to his school, north of Helsinki, at the beginning of the calendar year. After the shooting, the police said, the boy also threatened students heading to another school.The boy, who cannot be criminally charged because of his age, was placed in the custody of social welfare authorities, the police said.“This incident is deeply upsetting,” Finland’s education minister,…

My husband is an experienced Realtor. Like many, he has stories of friends who choose not to use him in their real estate transactions. Their excuse is usually that they don’t want to mix business with friendship. (This suggests to me that they don’t believe the friendship is strong enough to weather the experience or that my husband isn’t professional enough to provide top-notch service.) He has lost friends who promised to use him and then didn’t — and others who didn’t even give him a chance to make his case. They have caused him personal and financial pain. One…

The solar eclipse that will cast a visible shadow across the United States on Monday is already leaving an obvious mark on hotel prices.The Super 8 hotel chain is considered an inexpensive option for travelers, and it has over 1,400 American locations. About 300 of those are within the path of totality, and 100 of those were sold out for Sunday or Monday, according to the Super 8 website.Roughly 45 percent of Super 8s within 25 miles of the center path of totality that still had vacancies were listing rooms for at least double their usual price. One Super 8…

John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana. “We are a whole new people with a whole new…

President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday, three days after international aid workers were killed in an Israeli strike, as senior American officials said his frustration over Israel’s actions in Gaza was coming to a head.Mr. Biden’s anger and frustration over Israel’s conduct in the war has hit a peak in recent weeks, said a senior administration official who discussed the planned phone call and was not authorized to speak publicly. On Tuesday, the president said he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the previous day’s strike in Gaza that killed seven humanitarian workers, including an…

World Central Kitchen on Thursday called for an independent investigation into the killing by Israeli forces of seven of its staff members this week as they worked to deliver aid in Gaza.Governments around the world have condemned the killing of the workers. They included a man from Gaza and citizens of Australia, Britain and Poland, as well as a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that Israel “deeply regrets” the strikes, in which the military fired upon three vehicles carrying the aid workers on a coastal road in Gaza on Monday…

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Second-seeded Iowa State leads top-seeded UNLV by 20 points in the 1987 men’s basketball Elite Eight.The 1970 Iowa men’s basketball team still holds the Big Ten record for points per game (102.3) and led Jacksonville by one point with seconds left in the Sweet 16 matchup. Ronnie Lester was the best player in the 1980 Final Four, and the Hawkeyes point guard proved it in the first 10 minutes of the game against Louisville.Ronnie Harmon was an All-American running back who played in the 1986 Rose Bowl against UCLA, where No. 3 Iowa still had a…

Flower pots, they are not. But Stephen Procter’s large stoneware garden vessels, some as tall as five feet and incorporating 250 pounds of clay, are nevertheless functional pottery — even without the soil and the plants.In the clay world, he said, there’s always talk about functional versus nonfunctional pottery, attempting to draw a line between the two. Mr. Procter, a Vermont-based ceramist, has seen his and other such outsize garden sculptures in action, though.“An object that invites contemplation, and inspires, and offers this kind of mysterious sustenance is functional in a deep and important way,” he said. “Not functional that…

Have you retired? Or at least left your full-time, traditional job and embarked on a new chapter? For a special section on retirement and longevity to be published in June, The New York Times wants to hear from readers who have reinvented their lives after jobs or careers.Retirement can take on many different forms depending on a variety of factors. Maybe you moved. Maybe you started exercising. Maybe you started a new hobby or pursued a fresh passion for pay. We want to hear from people who used retirement as an opportunity to chart a new path.Here are some prompts…

For the last decade, Heartbeat Opera has treated the classics like rough drafts: The scores of “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Fidelio” and “Der Freischütz” have been starting points for something fresh, urgent and immediate.In New York, a city with fewer and fewer spaces for opera, Heartbeat sits harmoniously between the Prototype Festival, which stages new music theater at a chamber scale, and the grand tradition of the Metropolitan Opera. Heartbeat draws from the canon but reimagines it with an avant-garde spirit and an eye toward the issues of our time: gun violence, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement.Performed on intimate…