Author: NY TIMES

One of the tests of a great fashion brand is how its clothes look off the runway, on regular people — not celebrities paid to wear the clothes, or models styled in the clothes, but fans who most likely put their money where their taste was, bought a piece, and wear it as they want.So it was instructive that before the Diesel show on Wednesday a host of otherwise anonymous attendees in various versions of designer Glenn Martens’ shredded, lasered and otherwise altered denim were wandering around the cavernous show space taking selfies and looking not just cool or confident…

Now it’s Keir Starmer’s turn.After President Emmanuel Macron of France navigated his meeting with President Trump on Monday, skirting the rockiest shoals but making little headway, Mr. Starmer, the British prime minister, will meet Mr. Trump on Thursday to plead for the United States not to abandon Ukraine.Mr. Starmer will face the same balancing act as Mr. Macron did, without the benefit of years of interactions dating to 2017, when Mr. Trump greeted the newly elected French president with a white-knuckle handshake that was the first of several memorable grip-and-grin moments.Unlike Mr. Macron, Mr. Starmer will arrive in the Oval…

The founding family of 7-Eleven’s Japanese parent company has failed to secure the money to buy it out, the company said Thursday, months after they launched a bid worth over $50 billion to fend off a foreign takeover.Seven & i Holdings, which sits atop a vast network of 85,000 convenience stores, primarily in Asia and the United States, said in a statement that it would assess alternatives, including the proposal from Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard that the founding family had rejected.Junro Ito, an executive at Seven & i and the son of its founder, and Ito-Kogyo, the family’s asset management company,…

Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time?The company’s second lander, named Athena, launched on Wednesday evening on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is now on an arcing path to the moon.The spacecraft turned itself on, but then several minutes of suspense followed when it was late to check in. Eventually, data from the probe arrived, accompanied by relief at Intuitive Machines’ mission control.On March 6, the spacecraft will attempt to land in Mons Mouton, a…

An obscure but influential program that gave detailed public health information to about half of the world’s nations will fold as a result of the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid.With funding from the United States Agency for International Development, the Demographic and Health Surveys were the only sources of information in many countries about maternal and child health and mortality, nutrition, reproductive health and H.I.V. infections, among many other health indicators.The surveys collected data in 90 low- and middle-income nations, which then used the information to set health benchmarks at the local, national and global levels, including the 2030…

Luxury accommodations at a tropical resort. World-class hospitality. “Boundary-pushing” excursions by day. Beachside musical performances by night. And exorbitant ticket prices to boot.All of that might sound familiar to anyone who followed the well-chronicled saga of the Fyre Festival, an ill-fated musical carnival that, in 2017, was such a spectacular failure that it spawned dueling documentaries on Netflix and Hulu. Billy McFarland, the festival’s organizer, wound up going to prison for nearly four years after he entered a guilty plea to charges that included wire fraud.But Mr. McFarland, 33, a self-described tech entrepreneur, is back — and he is trying…

Hamas has agreed to release the remains of four Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli officials and the group said, resolving a dayslong impasse between the two sides.The agreement comes as the first phase of a fragile cease-fire deal draws to a close. Negotiators have yet to reach terms to extend the deal into a more comprehensive truce, raising concerns that the fighting in Gaza could resume.During the first phase, Hamas had agreed to free 25 Israeli hostages and hand over the bodies of eight more in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.…

In the movie “His Three Daughters,” Carrie Coon’s character, Katie, has rigid ideas about who her sisters are and what they’re capable of. When the women reunite to care for their dying father, those ideas become a barrier to true connection and care for each other.In this episode, Coon reads the Modern Love essay “A Family Label, Ungarbled” by Harriet Brown. Growing up, the author was never sure she could feel real love. It took breaking out of her mother’s ideas of her, and the birth of her daughter, to learn what love meant. Coon relates the essay to her…

Sometimes, silence speaks louder than song.That’s the hope, at least, for more than 1,000 musicians who released a lyric-less album on Tuesday to protest the British government’s proposal to expand the ways that developers can use copyright-protected works to train artificial intelligence models.The album, which was created by artists including Annie Lennox, Billy Ocean, Hans Zimmer and Kate Bush, is not exactly silent: It features recordings of empty studios, which the artists say represent “the impact we expect the government’s proposals would have on musicians’ livelihoods.”There are footsteps and rustles — is that a door closing? a page turning? a…

Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts voted in favor of a new contract on Tuesday, ending labor turbulence at ports that handle a large share of U.S. trade with the rest of the world.The dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, said nearly 99 percent of its members had supported the contract, which raises wages 62 percent over six years and guarantees jobs when employers introduce technology that can move cargo autonomously.The deal was reached after a short strike in October, the first full-scale walkout since 1977, and the intervention of two U.S. presidents.Officials from the Biden administration pushed the…