Author: NY TIMES

It was meant to be a moment of triumph for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a chance after weeks of maneuvering for an Oval Office meeting to demonstrate American backing in Europe’s bloodiest war in generations.Instead, the meeting unraveled into insults. Mr. Zelensky, who had stayed in his country to fight against a Russian onslaught and who rallied much of the world to support Ukraine, was left shaking his head as President Trump said he trusted Russia to uphold a cease-fire.He was berated by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance as “disrespectful” for arguing that Russia posed a threat…

Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste?Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Yizhen Jia, a graduate student in materials engineering at Ohio State University, his adviser Jinghua Li and their colleagues report that they helped volunteers taste flavors meant to represent distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cake and fish soup.In an interview, Mr.…

Every day, as Dr. Wendell Parkey enters his clinic in Seminole, a small city on the rural western edge of Texas, he announces his arrival to the staff with an anthem pumping loudly through speakers.As the song reaches a climax, he throws up an arm and strikes a pose in cowboy boots. “Y’all ready to stomp out disease?” he asks.Recently, the question has taken on a dark urgency. Seminole Memorial Hospital, where Dr. Parkey has practiced for nearly three decades, has found itself at the center of the largest measles outbreak in the United States since 2019.Since last month, more…

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.”…