Author: NY TIMES

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…

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…