Author: NY TIMES

“So, who’s the pig lover here?”Wandering the grounds of Ross Mill Farm, a foster home and boarding spot for porcine pets about an hour outside Philadelphia, the four members of the band Mannequin Pussy answered the facility’s owner nearly in unison: “We all are!”Pigs are pack animals — not so different from being in a touring rock band, the singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice, 36, noted playfully. Maxine Steen, 34, who plays synths and guitar, felt an instant kinship with a hesitant hog named Max, proclaiming them both “so aloof.” The band, which also includes the drummer Kaleen Reading, 31,…

Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel had many unpredictable consequences, but the elevation of the International Court of Justice to global public attention is a particularly unexpected one.In December, South Africa brought a case against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention, and last week the court held hearings on a separate matter regarding Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.The two matters have turned the court into a new arena for the political disputes and legal arguments over Israel’s actions in Gaza, where over 29,000 people have been killed, many by heavy Israeli bombardment. And although the court’s enforcement powers are…

BERLIN — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago was an enormous shock to Europeans. Used to 30 years of post-Cold War peace, they had imagined European security would be built alongside a more democratic Russia, not reconstructed against a revisionist imperial war machine.There was no bigger shock than in Finland, with its long border and historical tension with Russia, and in Sweden, which had dismantled 90 percent of its army and 70 percent of its air force and navy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.After the decision by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to…

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued to block Kroger, the supermarket giant, from completing its $24.6 billion acquisition of the grocery chain Albertsons, saying the deal would hurt competition in the industry.The agency said the deal, which would be the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history, would also likely result in higher prices for groceries for consumers and, with fewer supermarkets, reduce the ability for grocery-store employees to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions.“This supermarket mega merger comes as American consumers have seen the cost of groceries rise steadily over the past few years,” Henry Liu, director of…

Odysseus, the American robotic spacecraft that landed on the moon last week, is likely to die in the next day or so.Communications with the toppled lander remain limited and will end when sunlight is no longer shining on the solar panels, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built and operates Odysseus, said on Monday morning.The company also released images that the spacecraft took as it descended, but none yet from the surface.Odysseus is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first private one ever to successfully set down there in one…

The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a…

Olivia Rodrigo shot to pop stardom pretty much overnight: Her first single, “Drivers License,” rocketed to No. 1 in January 2021 while most of the world was still in coronavirus lockdown, making her the youngest artist to debut atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. In April of the following year, she finally brought her songs to life onstage with her punky Sour Tour, which played theaters, though she could have easily sold out arenas. Now she has done just that: Her tour supporting her second album, the cathartic, rock-oriented LP “Guts,” kicked off last Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm…

Israeli airstrikes inside Lebanon on targets associated with the Hezbollah militia hit deeper than any in recent years on Monday, targeting an area close to the Syrian border.The Israeli military said that its fighter jets had struck Hezbollah air defenses in the Bekaa Valley, about 60 miles from the Israeli border. It said that the strikes were in response to a surface-to-air missile attack that downed an Israeli drone over southern Lebanon. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for that attack.At least two Hezbollah fighters were killed in the Israeli airstrikes and at least six other people were wounded, according to Bachir Khodor,…

Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts and philanthropist with close ties to Israel, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87.His death was announced on Monday by the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was the chairman. It did not specify when or where he died or give the cause of death.Mr. Rothschild — more formally the fourth Baron Rothschild — was descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin trader in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, who sent…

Tianna James used to love looking at the photographs Dronme Davis posted of herself on Instagram. Ms. Davis, a plus-size model, included pictures from her modeling campaigns alongside selfies of her stretch-marked stomach with captions like “fat belly saggy tits Sunday.”For Ms. James, 22, Ms. Davis’s feed was a revelation. “I wanted to feel comfortable in my body, and she was like me in so many ways, so it made it easier to be myself,” Ms. James said. “If I could find this person so beautiful, and she was bigger, I could find myself beautiful, too.”Ms. Davis gained a following…