Author: NY TIMES

The K-pop star looked utterly drained. Her face scrubbed of makeup, Goo Hara, one of South Korea’s most popular musical artists, gazed into the camera during an Instagram livestream from a hotel room in Japan. In a fading voice, she read questions from fans watching from around the world.“You going to work, fighting?” one asked.In halting English, she gave a plaintive answer: “My life is always so fighting.”By the time she climbed into bed at the end of the livestream in November 2019, she had reached a low point after a lifetime of struggle. As a child, she was abandoned…

An ocean away, Elizabeth Price, Hisham’s mother, was woken up by a call from her brother in Burlington. He was at a hospital, he told her. Hisham and his friends had been shot. Elizabeth struggled to process what he was saying. Shock came first, then guilt: The children had been visiting her mother’s house. She immediately rang Tamara. “Shot where, shot how?” Tamara screamed into the phone. Her mind raced. “Is Kinnan OK? Is he dead? Is he dead?”The families hurried to reach Vermont. Elizabeth, her husband and Tamara headed out first; Tahseen’s mother, who had to sort out visa…

Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, will be buried on Friday after a funeral service in Moscow that will be open to the public, his family and aides said on Wednesday, while warning that the authorities could try to prevent people from attending or force the service to be called off.The planned funeral, at a church on Moscow’s outskirts, sets up the possibility of a rare display of opposition sentiment in the Russian capital — and of a new crackdown on Mr. Navalny’s supporters. Although the opposition leader’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, advised anyone planning to attend to “come early,”…

When you read — a book, a traffic sign, a billboard, this article — how much do you really notice the letters? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably not at all.But even if you don’t really notice them, you might sense it if something has subtly changed. That’s a feeling some people have had in recent weeks when they turn on their Microsoft Word programs.After 17 years of Calibri as Word’s default typeface, many users suddenly found themselves typing in a new typeface called Aptos. The change is also affecting the look of PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel.Letters…

Innovation on wheels Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company.Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes.Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has never publicly acknowledged its existence. That said,…

President Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday seeking to restrict the sale of sensitive American data to China, Russia and four more countries, a first-of-its-kind attempt to keep personally identifying information from being obtained for blackmail, scams or other harm.The president will ask the Justice Department to write rules restricting the sale of information about Americans’ locations, health and genetics to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as any entities linked to those countries. The restrictions would also cover financial information, biometric data and other types of information that could identify individuals and sensitive information…

Just below rows of energy and kombucha drinks at Westside Market, a deli in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, sit a few glass bottles of Vybes. The drink, which comes in flavors like strawberry lavender and blood orange lime, is made with cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD.But a lack of federal rules and a mishmash of state regulations have made it impossible for Vybes to be distributed by a national retailer, like Target or Walmart. That has hindered the potential growth for the drink, said Jonathan Eppers, who left the technology industry to create Vybes in 2018.“For the first…

Justin Peck was around 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album “Illinois,” an epic paean to the state, nearly two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and sometimes obscure local history. This listening experience came long before Peck wanted to make dances, before he was even a professional dancer.But “Illinois” urged him to move. “It was an instantaneous, illuminating thing that I felt like it was so danceable,” said Peck, now the resident choreographer and artistic adviser at New York City Ballet. “And it is so rare to find someone who can conjure that,…

Why does this election matter?Iran is holding parliamentary elections on March 1, the first general vote since an uprising, led by women and girls, swept across the country in 2022, calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The government violently crushed the protests, but demands for change endure and many Iranians view boycotting the vote as an act of protest.Election turnout is expected to be low, especially in the capital, Tehran, and other major cities, according to the government’s own polls cited in Iranian media. The election is important because voter turnout is viewed by both supporters and…

When the Bosnian sheep farmer fled his home in a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992, trekking with his family for 40 days to escape the start of a war that would pit neighbor against neighbor, the village he left behind had more than 400 people, two shops and a school.More than half the villagers were fellow Muslims, the rest Serbs, but nobody, he said, paid much attention to that until extremist politicians started screaming for blood.After more than a decade away from his home in eastern Bosnia, the farmer, Fikret Puhalo, 61, returned to his village, Socice. By then it had…