Author: NY TIMES

The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin.Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date has been announced for the launch. It will also include Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer; Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, who is Mr. Bezos’ fiancée and a helicopter pilot.The company has garnered…

As the first phase of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas winds down this weekend, the future of the truce remains murky. What happens in a key strip of land along the border between Egypt and Gaza in the coming week could provide an indication of how things will move forward.Israel is supposed to begin withdrawing troops on Sunday from the border area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and leave it completely by the following weekend. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has long said that Israeli control there is a core security national interest, injecting uncertainty over this step.Here’s…

More hostage releases were set to unfold over the following days, but the 2023 deal soon collapsed: Israel blamed Hamas for reneging on the terms of the agreement by attempting to release three corpses instead of three living female hostages. Members of Israel’s war cabinet argued in closed meetings that Israel should overlook the infraction and maintain the cease-fire, to save as many hostages as it could. “I thought that it was right to continue implementing the deal in any way possible,” Gadi Eisenkot, a retired general and member of the war cabinet, told the investigative news show “Uvda” last…

Actors may deliver impassioned speeches about achieving their “childhood dreams,” but we don’t often hear about how those sculpting wounds with clay and bubbling skin with latex are fulfilling their lifelong fantasies.“Teenager treats” is how Pierre Olivier Persin, the special effects designer nominated for an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling for “The Substance,” described his work on the film, which involved two full-body prosthetics and countless other pieces and puppets. Mike Marino, the makeup designer for Sebastian Stan in “A Different Man,” nominated in the same category, described his childhood bedroom as a sort of cabinet of curiosities, filled with…

A general strike in Greece on Friday halted trains and ferries, grounded flights and disrupted public services as thousands of workers walked off the job on the second anniversary of Greece’s worst-ever railway disaster.The 24-hour walkout, called by Greece’s two main labor unions, is the latest in a series of public protests over a dragging judicial investigation into the crash, in which 57 people were killed. There is still lingering anger in the country over the government’s failure to put any of its politicians under scrutiny over the loss of life.Here is what to know about the strike and the…

For days, Attorney General Pam Bondi had talked about releasing the “Epstein files,” supposedly secret documents the federal government has on some of the powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.But the roughly 200 pages of documents that Ms. Bondi released on Thursday contained little new information pointing to wrongdoing by anyone other than Mr. Epstein, a registered sex offender who died in jail. The document dump largely consisted of flight logs for Mr. Epstein’s planes — long ago made public — and contact information for hundreds of associates, along with brief descriptions of…

Tesla has fired a manager who objected to a social media post by Elon Musk, the chief executive, that referred to Nazi leaders. It was the latest example that public criticism of the boss was unacceptable in the Musk business empire.Jared Ottmann, a manager and engineer who worked with Tesla’s battery suppliers, said he had been fired because he criticized Mr. Musk for a post on X that used the names of Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring in a series of wordplay.“Stop Göring your enemies,” Mr. Musk wrote on Jan. 23, adding, “Bet you did Nazi that coming.”…

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.Here are some of the projects that The New York Times has confirmed have been canceled:A $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio immunization program, which paid for planning, logistics and delivery of vaccines to millions of children.A $90 million contract…

Field: Complete NocturnesAlice Sara Ott, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)The Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) is commonly said to have invented the nocturne as a piece for piano, passing the form along for his younger contemporary Frédéric Chopin to perfect. If sometimes forgotten, Field’s contributions have hardly escaped notice. Liszt himself published an edition of nine of them­ — “where else would we encounter such perfection of incomparable naïveté?” he asked in a preface — and recordings periodically appear to remind listeners of their many virtues.Alice Sara Ott, perhaps the most prominent pianist yet to set them to disc, gives them all…

The imprisoned leader of a Kurdish guerrilla movement that has been waging a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for decades called on Thursday for his fighters to lay down their arms.The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries. The group’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, made his appeal in a written statement that was read aloud during a news conference by members of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish political party who had just visited him in prison.Mr. Ocalan called for the P.K.K. to lay down its weapons, saying in the statement…