Author: NY TIMES

Israel’s military on Thursday said it supported new initiatives to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, air and sea, just hours after the military’s chief spokesman said it was trying to “flood” the enclave with sorely needed aid.Israel has endorsed three new aid efforts over the past week — a ship carrying food approaching the coast off Gaza; airdrops by foreign countries; and an initial convoy of six trucks crossing directly from Israel into northern Gaza, where aid agencies say hunger is severest, for the first time since Oct. 7.The public signaling from Israeli officials follows increasingly urgent calls…

Prime Minister Viktor Orban is jeopardizing Hungary’s position as a trusted NATO ally, the U.S. ambassador to Budapest warned on Thursday, with “its close and expanding relationship with Russia,” and with “dangerously unhinged anti-American messaging” in state-controlled media.The ambassador, David Pressman, has for months criticized Mr. Orban for effectively siding with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russa over the war in Ukraine, but his latest remarks sharply ratcheted up tensions and indicated that trust in Hungary among NATO allies had collapsed.Hungary is “an ally that behaves unlike any other” and is “alone on the defining issue of European security of…

Ed Begley Jr. could be described as Hollywood royalty: The actor is a son of another actor, Ed Begley, who won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1963.But the younger Mr. Begley, a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, commuted to this year’s ceremony like a plebeian by taking the Los Angeles Metro. His trip was filmed by his daughter Hayden Begley, who later shared the video on TikTok, where it has since received more than six million views.The video opens with Ms. Begley, 24, asking her mother, Rachelle Carson,…

The Energy Department is moving forward on a deal to provide a $2.3 billion loan to Lithium Americas Corp. in an effort to shore up domestic supplies of a mineral vital for the production of electric vehicles.If finalized, the loan would help finance the construction of a lithium carbonate processing plant at Thacker Pass in Nevada. The plant would be next to a mine site that contains the largest known lithium deposit in North America.Demand for lithium, which is used in the rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles, has surged as more consumers shift away from gas-burning cars and automakers…

In Taiwan, the government is racing to do what no country or even company has been able to: build an alternative to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX.Starlink has allowed militaries, power plants and medical workers to maintain crucial online connections when primary infrastructure has failed in emergencies, such as an earthquake in Tonga and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Officials in Taiwan face constant reminders that its communication infrastructure must be able to withstand a crisis. The island democracy sits 80 miles from China, where leaders have vowed to use force if needed to assert…

Teen pregnancy increases the chances that a young woman will drop out of school and struggle with poverty, research has shown. Teenagers are also more likely to develop serious medical complications during pregnancy.Now a large study in Canada reports another disturbing finding: Women who were pregnant as teenagers are more likely to die before their 31st birthday. The trend was observed among women who had carried teen pregnancies to term, as well as among those who had miscarried.“The younger the person was when they became pregnant, the greater their risk was of premature death,” said Dr. Joel G. Ray, an…

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 2020, announced on Thursday that he would step down when his contract expires next year, citing differences with the orchestra’s board.Salonen, 65, a groundbreaking conductor who has promoted new music and experimented with virtual reality and artificial intelligence, said he no longer saw a path forward.“I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he said in a statement. “I am sincerely looking forward…

Even as Israel let the aid directly into the north, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the main U.N. agency providing support for Palestinians in Gaza, said that Israeli forces had struck a food distribution center in the southern city of Rafah, killing one agency worker and injuring 22 others. He said the center was hit even though UNRWA shares the coordinates of its facilities with all parties to the war.“Attacks against U.N. facilities, convoys and personnel have become commonplace, in blatant disregard to international humanitarian law,” Mr. Lazzarini said.The Israeli military, in a statement, said the strike on Wednesday…

At the World Bank’s annual meetings last year in Morocco, the organization’s new president, Ajay Banga, outlined a sweeping vision for how he wanted to rid the world of poverty while keeping the planet habitable.Four months later, Mr. Banga, who assumed the top job last June, is confronting his first big management test and some early signs of unrest that have little to do with his aspirations to modernize the bank and supercharge its ambitions to combat climate change.The challenge is related to an investment that the World Bank made a decade ago in a chain of schools in Kenya.…

“The bag, it carries your things and carries your secrets,” Priscila Alexandre Spring said. The 43-year-old creative director of leather goods at Hermès sat in her office in Pantin, just outside of Paris, explaining what she liked about designing bags — in particular, the relationship between “your private life and your exterior life.”Ms. Alexandre Spring joined the Hermès leather goods métier in 2015, and in 2020 she was appointed to her current role. Hermès, which began in 1837 as a saddle maker, is a name that comes with intimations of money (bags often sell for more than $10,000), scarcity (if…