Author: NY TIMES

In San Francisco, a 20-story office tower that sold for $146 million a decade ago was listed in December for just $80 million.In Chicago, a 200,000-square-foot-office building in the city’s Clybourn Corridor that sold in 2004 for nearly $90 million was purchased last month for $20 million, a 78 percent markdown.And in Washington, a 12-story building that mixes office and retail space three blocks from the White House that sold for $100 million in 2018 recently went for just $36 million.Such steep discounts have become normal for office space across the United States as the pandemic trends of hybrid and…

Which billionaire space company will get to the moon first: Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin?At first glance, SpaceX seems to have a huge head start. It is about to launch the third test flight of Starship. A variation of Starship is scheduled to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as September 2026.By contrast, Blue Origin has yet to launch anything into orbit, and its contract with NASA for a lunar lander for astronauts is for a mission that is launching in 2030.But Blue Origin might still get there first. SpaceX faces major…

In this romantic comedy featuring Zach Braff and Vanessa Hudgens, a New York man heads to Quebec City with his French Canadian girlfriend. Shenanigans ensue. Source link

The amount of aid reaching Gaza has fallen sharply since Israel went to war with Hamas, leading to what humanitarian agencies say is a disaster for more than two million people. Source link

Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat who as a lead negotiator for the United Nations helped resolve conflicts across the globe — most notably spending nearly a year in the early 1990s shuttling around the Middle East to secure the release of 11 hostages held by terrorist groups in Lebanon — died on Sunday in Wilton, Conn., north of Norwalk. He was 75.His son Giacomo said the cause of his death, at an assisted living home, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Mr. Picco spent 20 years with the U.N., mostly in a series of loosely defined roles that placed him at the…

Ms. Kwan’s suits were filed on Feb. 1 and 2. On March 8, Mr. Deshmukh agreed to be served, less than an hour after receiving a fact-checking inquiry from The Times. Five days later, Ms. Kwan agreed to drop the suits after the parties settled.Sheryl Heefner, Superiority Burger’s general manager, wrote in a statement that “Ashwin has been critical to the development of Superiority Burger,” adding, “he is also my friend who I love working alongside.”Mr. Deshmukh is not famous, but he is widely known among downtown tech investors, restaurateurs, bar owners, journalists, fashionistas, podcasters, D.J.s and influencers. If you…

American Ballet Theater, one of the largest dance companies in the United States, has faced a series of challenges in recent months. Relations with the dancers have been tense, finances have been strained and the organization has lacked a permanent executive director.On Thursday, Ballet Theater announced it was bringing in a dance veteran as it tries to move beyond its woes: Barry Hughson, executive director of the National Ballet of Canada, will join the company in that role in July. He succeeds Janet Rollé, who resigned suddenly last summer after 17 months on the job.Hughson, 56, a former dancer, said…

For Elon Musk, Starship is really a Mars ship. He envisions a fleet of Starships carrying settlers to the red planet in the coming years.And for that eventual purpose, Starship, under development by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, has to be big. Stacked on top of what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by pretty much every measure, the biggest and most powerful ever.It is the tallest rocket ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.And it has the most engines ever in…

But while mainstream country has leaned into booze, trucks and arena-scale bombast, Musgraves prefers delicacy, detail and wryly upending small-town expectations. The title song of her second album, “Pageant Material,” explained: “It ain’t that I don’t care about world peace/But I don’t see how I can fix it in a swimsuit on a stage.”Her music prizes understatement, bypassing standard Nashville sounds and often harking back to 1970s Laurel Canyon folk-pop. Like that era’s songwriters and producers, Musgraves is steeped in folk music and seemingly diaristic, but also unassumingly savvy about pop structures and studio possibilities.On “Star-Crossed,” Musgraves sang about marital…

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.While many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top,” Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace…