Author: NY TIMES

The Israeli government on Wednesday laid out plans to expand its renewed military offensive in the Gaza Strip and seize large parts of the enclave, a strategy that piles more pressure on Hamas and raises concerns about Israel’s plans beyond the war.The announcement from Israel’s defense minister adds to the growing drumbeat from officials in recent days who have suggested that Israel was shifting tactics to hold on to swaths of the territory, at least temporarily. They have asserted a vision for postwar Gaza in which Palestinians would move elsewhere — an idea vehemently rejected by much of the world.In…

I am getting married in two weeks, and I’m really excited! We have been planning this wedding for nine months. One of our biggest scheduling concerns was my fiancé’s brother: He’s in the Army. Yesterday, he told my fiancé that his wife would not be joining him at the wedding. Last week, she auditioned to be a dancer for a professional football team and was offered the job. (There’s a game on our wedding day.) I am shocked and hurt that she made this decision! I am also shocked that my future brother-in-law supports his wife’s choice. Even my future…

More than a century after the fighting stopped, the U.S. Army’s First Division has not fully faded from memory in Cantigny, the tiny hilltop village in northern France that it helped to save in World War I.In the woods, there is the trench that was once the unit’s muddy forward position. In a cellar, graffiti scrawled on stone by young, green doughboys, among the first Americans to see action in that war. In patches of farmland, the live shells that for years have turned up during plowing.And in an otherwise unremarkable back room, grenades and shell casings found in the…

China’s Xiaomi, a consumer electronics giant turned automaker, said it was cooperating with a police investigation into a fatal crash involving one of its electric vehicles while the driver was using the car’s autonomous driving features.A Xiaomi SU7 sedan drove into a concrete guardrail on an expressway in eastern China late Saturday at around 60 miles per hour, according to a post on Xiaomi’s official social media account. On Tuesday, local media published reports about the collision and ensuing fire, which killed three college students, along with pictures of the charred remains of the vehicle.Xiaomi said the driver had deployed…

President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a proposal that could secure TikTok’s future in the United States, two people familiar with the plans said.Mr. Trump will consider a proposal for a new ownership structure for the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Lawmakers and other U.S. officials have argued that the app’s ties to China raise national security concerns, and a federal law that was passed last year requires TikTok to change its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The latest deadline for…

It’s not just the high price of eggs or the rising cost of housing that is contributing to Americans’ unhappiness over the cost of living. Health care remains stubbornly unaffordable for millions of people, according to a new survey released Wednesday that underscores the struggle many people have in paying for a doctor’s visit or a prescription drug — even before any talk of cutting government coverage.In the survey, 11 percent of people said they could not afford medication and care within the past three months, the highest level in the four years the survey has been conducted. More than…

Hope may seem daring in this age of angst and uncertainty, but it is at the heart of three major new works coming to the Fisher Center at Bard, including a musical adaptation of “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.With a $2.5 million gift from the Civis Foundation, matched by Bard College for an initial endowment of $5 million, the Fisher Center said it would create the Civis Hope Commissions, a program to support “contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate and transform American artifacts, archival materials or artworks from the past to imagine a more…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel backed away from his nominee for the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service on Tuesday after conservative allies attacked him for criticizing President Trump and Israeli media reported that he had protested judicial overhauls pushed by Mr. Netanyahu’s government.Mr. Netanyahu had backed Eli Sharvit, a former commander of Israel’s navy, to lead the Shin Bet intelligence agency after he dismissed his predecessor, Ronen Bar, a decision that prompted protests. But the Israeli leader dropped Mr. Sharvit a day after the Monday announcement after a backlash from the right, partly because he had written a…

When I saw Mindy Prugnaud out in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in February, I was compelled to say hello. I just had to learn more about her marvelous coat.Ms. Prugnaud, 56, had recently bought it at an Isaac Mizrahi archive sale, she said, adding that the brand’s eponymous designer was a friend. “Isaac’s fashion shows were always so fabulously chic in the ’90s,” said Ms. Prugnaud, an owner of Mint Group, a fashion company in Europe that, among other things, oversees buying operations for certain American department stores. She owns the company with her…

The travel agency offered tours aimed solely at men, and that was enough to attract the attention of the police enforcing new Russian laws that restrict the rights of gay people.One night in December, officers stormed the apartment of the agency’s owner and tied him up, he later told a court.“Fifteen people came to my place at night,” said the owner, Andrei Kotov. “They were beating me in the face, kicking me and leaving bruises.” His comments were reported by Russian media and confirmed by his lawyer.Mr. Kotov said the officers pressured him to “confess” that he was running a…