Author: NY TIMES

Caroline Marie Darmody first noticed Jared Joseph Jones during a February 2016 orientation session for an upcoming staff delegation trip to India. At the time, both worked as legislative assistants in Washington, but on different sides of the aisle: Mr. Jones for Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Ms. Darmody for Democratic Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts.“I was seated across this long rectangular table from Jared,” Ms. Darmody said. “I thought, who’s this big happy teddy bear person?”Later that month, the two arrived in India. “At the time, I was a young, hard-line, left-of-center, ‘I…

The climate law that President Biden signed in 2022 has created a large and growing market for companies to buy and sell clean-energy tax credits, new Treasury Department data suggests, creating opportunities for start-ups to raise money for projects like wind farms and solar panel installations.The market also provides new opportunities for large companies and financial firms to make money.Treasury officials reported on Tuesday that more than 500 companies had registered a total of 45,500 new clean-energy projects with the Internal Revenue Service in order to benefit from tax breaks in the 2022 law. That law, the Inflation Reduction Act,…

A Canadian man who lives in China was arrested Tuesday and held in New York after he and a business partner were accused of trying to sell secret battery manufacturing technology belonging to Tesla.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked a judge to hold Klaus Pflugbeil without bail on a charge of theft of trade secrets. He was arrested after meeting with undercover agents Tuesday on Long Island and trying to sell them technology used to produce battery parts, the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York said in a statement.The second man, Yilong Shao, 47, a…

The climate activist was tired. Protests at the house of Shell’s chief executive had led to little more than free cookies and the police being called to break things up. The same thing had happened the week before. And the week before that. And the week before that.“I don’t wanna be perfect,” they screamed into a loudspeaker in Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “The Shell Trial.” “I just don’t wanna die,” the activist added, with an expletive for emphasis.It was a moment of one person speaking for many, and for “The Shell Trial” itself, which premiered at the Dutch National…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday brushed aside President Biden’s opposition to a planned ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, saying that his government would press ahead despite pleas for restraint from the United States and key allies.Mr. Netanyahu made the remarks to Israeli lawmakers a day after speaking by phone with Mr. Biden, who reiterated his stance against an offensive into Rafah, arguing that it could be disastrous for the people there and that Israel had other ways of achieving its objective of defeating Hamas.At the president’s request, Mr. Netanyahu agreed to send a…

During the brutal Battle of Okinawa in Japan, in the final months of World War II, a group of American soldiers took residence in the palace of a royal family who had fled the fighting. When a palace steward returned after the war was over, he said later, the treasure was gone.Some of those valuables surfaced decades later in the attic of the Massachusetts home of a World War II veteran, whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not identify in announcing the find last week.The veteran’s family discovered the cache of vibrant paintings and pottery; large fragile scrolls; and…

In a public library, styling a bookshelf is easy: Just fill it with books. At home, a bookcase needs to do a lot more than hold books.So how do the pros do it?Start by thinking of your shelves as a kind of three-dimensional wallpaper that adds visual interest to a room. The things you choose to display should express your personality.“It’s like a little cabinet of curiosities,” said Jeremiah Brent, an interior designer and the newest cast member of Netflix’s “Queer Eye.” Your bookshelves, he added, offer “an opportunity for people to look in and see where you’ve been and…

Volkswagen employees in Tennessee who are hoping to join the United Automobile Workers asked a federal agency on Monday to hold an election, a key step toward the union’s longtime goal of organizing nonunion factories across the South.The union said Volkswagen workers had filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for a unionization vote after a “supermajority” of the 4,000 eligible workers at the plant had signed cards supporting the U.A.W.It did not specify how many workers had signed cards, but it previously advised workers to get the support of more than 70 percent of hourly workers…

Apple is in discussions with Google about using the search giant’s generative artificial intelligence model called Gemini for its next iPhone, as the company races to embrace a technology that has upended the tech industry.The talks are preliminary and the exact scope of a potential deal hasn’t been defined, three people with knowledge of the discussions said. Apple has also held discussions with other A.I. companies, one of these people said, as it looks to tap into the power of a large language model capable of analyzing vast amounts of data and generating text on its own.Tim Cook, Apple’s chief…

“He was kind of like my self-discovery composer,” Tetelman said. When he began learning Puccini roles, he said, he felt that “this is the music I want to build my voice with, this is the music I want to discover my voice with.“I think Puccini gives you a lot of opportunity to fail,” he added, “to reinvent and to change who you are, because Puccini is verismo,” referring to the earthy and emotional late-Romantic style that Puccini wrote in. “It’s never the same from one performance to the next.”When we spoke, Tetelman had just returned from Palermo, Sicily, where he…