Author: NY TIMES

The Alabama Supreme Court has opened a new front in the legal debate over when human life begins. Embryos created and stored in a medical facility must be considered children under the state’s law governing harmful death, the court ruled.Friday’s ruling was cheered by anti-abortion activists nationwide, who have long argued that life begins at conception. They were thrilled that, for the first time, a court included conception outside the uterus in that definition. But the strongest and most immediate effect of the decision will be on fertility patients trying to get pregnant, not women seeking to end their pregnancies.The…

Just before midnight on Saturday, hard techno began pulsating from the Market Hotel, a D.I.Y. music venue located beside the elevated tracks of a Myrtle Avenue subway station in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A crowd of 20-somethings, many of them wearing sunglasses, ripped jeans and fanny packs, lined up in the cold before they threw themselves onto the dance floor.The party, “Market Hotel Sweet Sixteen,” was meant to commemorate the venue’s legacy as a D.I.Y. rock club. But as the beats continued toward dawn, the celebration was more about the current moment in a vastly changed underground scene.Over a decade ago, the…

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken confronted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil on Wednesday about his recent sharp comments on Israel, including the Brazilian leader’s comparison of Israel’s attacks in Gaza to the Holocaust.The sparring showed how the enduring war in Gaza has continued to expand into a broader diplomatic problem for the United States, and how the war’s mounting death toll has spurred more nations to speak out against Israel’s offensive.An intensifying dispute between Brazil and Israel broke out this week over Mr. Lula’s comments on Sunday that the only comparison to Israel’s killing of Palestinian…

An Israeli organization that supports survivors of sexual abuse released a report on Wednesday concluding that acts of sexual violence against Israelis during and after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 were “systematic and widespread.”“The report finds that the Hamas attack included brutal acts of violent rape, often involving threats with weapons, specifically directed towards injured women,” said the group, The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an umbrella organization of nine such organizations in Israel. The report added that many incidents involved gang rape.“Often, the rape was perpetrated in front of an audience — partners, family or friends…

What makes a house a home?On Tuesday night, that question floated in the delicately candle-scented air of a three-story penthouse apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where the interior designer Jeremiah Brent lives with his husband and fellow designer, Nate Berkus, and their two children.An intimate gathering of about 30 guests had assembled to celebrate the publication of Mr. Brent’s first book, “The Space That Keeps You,” a collection of photos and stories of interesting people and their enviable houses.For Mr. Brent, who along with Mr. Berkus is a mainstay on HGTV with shows like “The Nate & Jeremiah…

“No society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”I have that quote (from “Crabgrass Frontier,” the seminal history of America’s suburbs) taped to a wall behind my desk. It summarizes why I love covering housing for The New York Times and seem never to run out of things to write about. Housing is everything. It’s where we live and raise our families. It is most people’s largest store of wealth. Whether you own, you rent, or you sleep outside, where you hang your head defines much of your existence.Over the past few decades, and especially since…

Why It Matters: A factory that has divided a town.Tesla’s decision to settle in Grünheide, which is in the state of Brandenburg, and the speed with which the factory was built — 861 days — has been a point of pride for local politicians in a country known for its onerous permitting processes.The factory, which opened two years ago, has also become an important driver of growth in the state, long one of the most economically challenged in Germany. Brandenburg recorded economic growth of 6 percent in the first half of 2023, largely driven by the 11,000 jobs at the…

Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the environment.The university’s decision has left researchers reeling. “This is such a devastating blow for biodiversity science,” said Erika Edwards, the curator of the Yale Herbarium. “The entire community is simultaneously shocked and outraged.”Scientific societies have also protested the move. “Duke’s decision to forgo responsibility of…

In 1960, Mr. Van Eaton left Sun to join Mr. Riley and the guitarist Roland Janes, both of whom were disenchanted with how Mr. Riley was being promoted, as the staff drummer at the newly formed Rita Records. Their biggest success came with the singer Harold Dorman’s 1960 Top 40 hit, “Mountain of Love.”Mr. Van Eaton also released a single under his own name for Rita, an atmospheric, surf-style recording called “Beat-Nik,” also from 1960. By the middle of the decade, however, he had all but retired from the music business. He worked for his father-in-law’s vending machine company before…

An escalation of the war in Gaza could lead to the deaths of 85,000 Palestinians from injuries and disease over the next six months, in the worst of three scenarios that prominent epidemiologists have modeled in an effort to understand the potential future death toll of the conflict.These fatalities would be in addition to the more than 29,000 deaths in Gaza that local authorities have attributed to the conflict since it began in October. The estimate represents “excess deaths,” above what would have been expected had there been no war.In a second scenario, assuming no change in the current level…