Author: NY TIMES

Taylor Swift has descended on Southeast Asia, or one small part of it at least: All of her six sold-out shows are in Singapore, the region’s wealthiest nation.Many of her fans in this part of the world, which is home to more than 600 million people, are disappointed. But the Singapore leg of Ms. Swift’s wildly popular Eras Tour, which began last weekend and ends on Saturday, is a soft power coup and a boost for the country’s post-pandemic economic recovery.The shows — and the undisclosed price that Singapore paid to host them — have also generated diplomatic tension with…

The madness has arrived.The first men’s basketball conference tournament begins this week, beginning with the first round of the Atlantic Sun Tournament on Monday. The first automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament will be awarded Saturday night in the Ohio Valley Tournament championship game. In many of these early events, the drama reaches a fever pitch as only the winner gets to hear its name called in Sunday’s judging.Here’s a guide to the 15 conference tournament games starting now through Sunday. Brackets are included in already set leagues. We’ll add new brackets to this story as they become available, and…

China top leaders set an ambitious goal for economic growth in 2024 as they tried to bolster conviction in an economy facing its biggest challenges in decades.But they announced only modest measures to stimulate growth, refraining from the kind of bold moves the business community has been looking for to address a property crisis, a loss of confidence among Chinese households and wariness by investors.Premier Li Qiang, the country’s No. 2 official after Xi Jinping, said in his report on Tuesday to the annual session of the legislature that the government would seek economic growth of “around 5 percent.” That…

In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve states’ claims that its Play Store had strong-armed app makers into high fees and tough terms. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to end a lawsuit accusing it of improperly sharing users’ private information.On Monday morning, a Massachusetts company called Singular Computing said it had resolved its lawsuit with Google, involving claims that the tech giant had stolen its chip designs. Singular said in a news release that it had “entered into a settlement and patent license agreement with Google.”Google is also on the verge of a fourth legal…

Mary Bartlett Bunge, who with her husband, Richard, studied how the body responds to spinal cord injuries and continued their work after his death in 1996, ultimately discovering a promising treatment to restore movement to millions of paralyzed patients, died on Feb. 17, at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 92.The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a nonprofit research organization with which Dr. Bunge (pronounced BUN-ghee) was affiliated, announced the death.“She definitely was the top woman in neuroscience, not just in the United States but in the world,” Dr. Barth Green, a co-founder and dean at the Miami…

In the middle of struggling through the opening monologue of the Golden Globes in January, the comic Jo Koy did something unusual, if not unprecedented, for the host of a major awards show: He blamed the writers.“I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at,” he said of his jokes, prompting writers across the country to grind their teeth.Koy, who later apologized, endured some light mockery a week after the show, when his ex-girlfriend Chelsea Handler followed up a successful joke in her monologue at the Critics Choice Awards by saying, “Thank you for laughing at…

Southeast London has temporarily lost one of its most famous residents: a giant taxidermy walrus that has been on display for more than a century.For most of the past 120 years, the walrus has sat in the middle of the Natural History Gallery at the Horniman Museum and Gardens. The museum displays the collection of Frederick Horniman, a wealthy tea trader who lived in Victorian England.The gallery, which in addition to the walrus holds other taxidermy animals, skeletons and insects, is being shuttered while the museum redevelops the space, with a focus on “environmental sustainability and a commitment to fighting…

These are the final seconds of the NBA Finals. In a one-point game, the clock hits 0.0, but the game continues for a few seconds as the Golden State Warriors drive to the rim.The battle continues at Madison Square Garden. The final bell rang in the 12th round, but the referee did little to stop Oleksandr Usyk’s progress as the Ukrainian boxer came close to a knockout.With one lap left in the Formula 1 World Championship and in a winner-take-all situation, the race director refused to take down the checkered flag as second place was chasing the leader. In fact,…

There are myriad words to describe how light enters and reflects in diamonds and gemstones. They glisten and sparkle, twinkle and dazzle. Often they are luminescent, sometimes brilliant and certainly eye-catching.But conveying those sentiments artistically, as in a drawing or painting, requires an entirely different kind of articulation. And as times have changed, so have the techniques used to capture jewelry, as well as the reasons for depicting it.“There is a code to always respect so that the eye can read the volume and the jewelers can understand the design,” Estelle Lagarde, 29, a gouache painter and jewelry designer in…

The main campus of the bankrupt San Francisco Art Institute, which is home to a beloved Diego Rivera mural, has been sold to a new nonprofit organization led by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs.The nonprofit, made up of local arts leaders and supporters including Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, bought the campus — which has been plagued by debt — through a limited liability company, for about $30 million. The sale, reported earlier in The San Francisco Chronicle, includes “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City,” a 1931 mural by Rivera,…