Author: NY TIMES

Before the United States presented a resolution at the United Nations Security Council on Friday calling for an “immediate and sustained cease-fire” in Gaza, it had vetoed three previous ones demanding a halt to the fighting. The United States has long used its veto power as a permanent Security Council member to block measures that Israel, its close ally, opposes. But the Biden administration has become increasingly vocal in criticizing Israel’s approach to the war against Hamas, and the resolution offered on Friday reflected that, using the strongest language the United States has supported at the U.N. in an effort…

As the Biden administration increasingly clashes with Israeli leaders over the war in Gaza, a question that often arises is whether U.S. officials will try to exercise some form of harder leverage as Israel ignores their pleas.They could do so, critics say, to try to get Israel to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza as it teeters on the brink of famine, to scale back its military campaign or to refrain from invading the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, where many civilians have fled.Since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about…

Let’s clear up a few things.Heidi Agan is not Catherine, Princess of Wales. She has never met Catherine, formerly known as Kate Middleton. She has never been contacted by Kensington Palace, nor is she secretly working with the royal family as part of a cover-up devised to hide the princess from public view.Ms. Agan is, however, a slender 43-year-old British brunette whose visage bears a resemblance to Catherine’s.She’s turned looking like one of the most famous women in the world into a job, performing at parties and events as a look-alike for hire. Recently, Ms. Agan has found herself at…

Ronna McDaniel, who stepped down as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee this month, is joining NBC News as an on-air contributor, the network said on Friday.The hire adds a reliably conservative voice to NBC’s stable of political analysts. Ms. McDaniel is also expected to provide commentary on MSNBC, NBC’s left-leaning cable cousin and a network that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies often accuse of being an arm of the Democratic Party.“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees NBC News political coverage, wrote…

Late in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” the movie shifts tones. Our heroine, a funny, foul-mouthed gofer who’s racking up miles driving in Bucharest, has just told her passenger about a road outside the city that has more memorials edging it than it has kilometers. The movie then cuts to one after another roadside memorial — some stone, others metal, some with photos, others with flowers — for an astonishing four silent minutes, and this near-unclassifiable, often comically ribald movie turns into a plaintive requiem.The woman, Angela — the sneakily charismatic Ilinca…

The Biden administration accelerated efforts to halt the Gaza war on Friday as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv and the C.I.A. director traveled to Qatar, where mediators were trying to narrow gaps between Israel and Hamas over a cease-fire deal.Mr. Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and with members of Israel’s war cabinet at a period of high tension between the allies. U.S. officials have become more vocal in criticizing Mr. Netanyahu’s war strategy, including his plan to mount a military offensive in Rafah, the southern Gazan city packed…

A week after Russia invaded Ukraine, in March 2022, a host of the British podcast “The Rest Is Politics” explained what it was like to be in a room with President Vladimir V. Putin.Alastair Campbell, who worked as the director of communications and strategy in Tony Blair’s Labour government, said that when he first met Russia’s president in 1999, he was “almost timid, very slight, very small, quite quiet.” But Putin’s aggression increased over time, Campbell said on the podcast, and at a dinner in 2003, the president had hurled abuse at Blair. Putin didn’t say that the British prime…

On my spouse Eli’s 27th birthday last year, I sat in a hotel room in Montreal — seeking refuge from a conference happy hour — scrolling through old photos and videos of us on my phone. I had looked at these photos and videos hundreds of times in the nearly two years since Eli had died in a hiking accident. Now I’d passed an inflection point in my camera roll where I had more photos without Eli than photos with Eli.And that imbalance would only grow. There would never be a new photo or video of him to add to…

It looks like there is little that can trouble investors at the moment.The S&P 500 is on course for its best week of the year so far, with a gain of about 2.5 percent with one more trading day to go. That added to gains that have lifted the benchmark index more than 10 percent this year, setting a series of record highs.Other major indexes, like the Dow Jones industrial average and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, have recently traded at or near record highs, as have individual companies as varied as Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart. Shares of the social…

It’s safe to say that the Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty” is a unique film. That might be the only safe thing about it.The first African movie musical, it traces nearly four centuries of French colonialism with unsparing clarity and relentless creativity, shot entirely on a replica of a slave ship built within an abandoned Citroën factory in Paris.Since its wonky release in 1979, it has quietly built a group of devoted fans, including the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who placed it at the top of his list of the greatest films of…