Author: NY TIMES

The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Turandot” is one of the most lavish and intricate in the company’s repertoire, a spectacle that includes an imperial palace, a glittering throne room and expansive gardens.But on Wednesday evening, audience members had to make do without the opera’s usual visual delights. A jam in the Met’s main lift backstage forced the company to put on a semi-staged version at the last minute, with the cast and chorus singing from an improvised set instead.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, walked onstage before the show to explain the situation.“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to say…

The United States has submitted a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council calling for “an immediate cease-fire tied to the release of hostages” in Gaza, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, during his latest trip to the region to broker a diplomatic resolution to the war between Israel and Hamas.Biden administration officials have grown more forceful in recent weeks in their push for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict, as the humanitarian conditions in Gaza have reached crisis levels and political pressures mount for international action.In an interview with Al Hadath, a Saudi-run…

The sun-soaked Algarve region on Portugal’s Southern coast is a place where guitar-strumming backpackers gather by fragrant orange trees and digital nomads hunt for laid-back vibes. It is not exactly what comes to mind when one envisions a stronghold of far-right political sentiment.But it is in the Algarve region where the anti-establishment Chega party finished first in national elections this month, both unsettling Portuguese politics and injecting new anxiety throughout the European establishment. Nationwide, Chega received 18 percent of the vote.“It’s a strong signal for Europe and for the world,” said João Paulo da Silva Graça, a freshly elected Chega…

“I hope you don’t mind — I’ll have a coterie of boys coming in all night,” Alan Cumming joked as he sidled into a banquette at an Upper West Side wine bar last week. A director had messaged him on Instagram, hoping to get Mr. Cumming to act in his short film, and they’d agreed to meet directly after this interview.Already that day, the 59-year-old Scottish actor had filmed a television appearance in the Meatpacking District, posed for two photo sessions and gone for a swim. Later, he was seeing the comedian Alex Edelman’s one-man show at the Beacon Theater…

Defying boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection — along with fashion writers and designers — considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.For years, none of them knew the origins of his expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s…

The internet has not been kind to Condé Nast, the publisher of starry magazines, like Vogue and Vanity Fair, whose fortunes and influence have waned in the digital age.But while the web taketh, it occasionally giveth, too.The Newhouse family, the media dynasty that controls Condé Nast through its holding company, Advance Publications, is set to reap a windfall of roughly $1.4 billion on Thursday when the social site Reddit is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Condé Nast acquired Reddit for a mere $10 million in 2006, later spinning it out into a stand-alone company.With its anarchic culture of…

The subsequent move to North Carolina represented the ultimate no. The night before the family left, Shook had their first beer, cigarette and kiss. A year later, at 21, they gave birth to Jonah. The acrimonious marriage soon ended, leaving Shook broke and broken.But it also led, in 2008, to a romance with an upright bassist who played Johnny Cash; it was the first time Shook, then 23, had knowingly heard country. They learned “Long Black Veil” and sensed a kinship. “I had been writing songs that felt like that already,” Shook remembered, “but I didn’t know what that meant.”New…

Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly spoken of the need to topple Hamas but has done little to address the power vacuum that would leave — especially after Israeli forces withdraw.That is already apparent in Gaza City, where a deadly battle at the territory’s largest hospital complex stretched into a third day on Wednesday, after the Israeli military said the re-emergence of Hamas fighters had forced it to return to a site it first stormed in November.The military said on Wednesday that it had killed dozens of militants…

As Beyoncé gears up for the release of her next solo album, “Cowboy Carter,” she teased fans on Tuesday with the new record’s cover, which, like her previous album, shows her sitting on a horse. But unlike on that record, “Renaissance,” this time she’s in full rodeo gear, riding a white stallion, kicking off a new era of her three-act project.It has been nearly two years since she dropped “Renaissance,” which birthed a world tour and inspired an array of sequined and chrome-heavy looks among fans internationally. If Act I, as she called that album, paid homage to disco and…

Angela Chao, the chief executive of a shipping company and part of a prominent family in American politics, was legally intoxicated when she drove into a pond in Texas and died last month, according to a police report released on Wednesday, which called the episode an “unfortunate accident.”The report, released by the Blanco County Sheriff’s Office, describes a harrowing scene on the night of Feb. 10 as friends and deputies tried frantically to pull Ms. Chao from her Tesla, after she drove it into the pond at a family ranch in Johnson City, Texas.Earlier that night, Ms. Chao, 50, had…