Author: NY TIMES

American intelligence agencies have told their closest European allies that if Russia is going to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, it will probably do so this year — but that it might instead launch a harmless “dummy” warhead into orbit to leave the West guessing about its capabilities.The assessment came as American intelligence officials conducted a series of rushed, classified briefings for their NATO and Asian allies, as details of the American assessment of Russia’s intentions began to leak out.The American intelligence agencies are sharply divided in their opinion about what President Vladimir V. Putin is planning, and on…

—Reporting by Andrew Marchand, Nicole Auerbach, Stewart Mandel and Chris VanniniThe future of college football may get some needed clarity this week. At least, that’s the hope of many involved in planning the sport’s much-anticipated expanded postseason.ESPN has reached an agreement with representatives of the College Football Playoff to extend the game’s television broadcasts by six years and $7.8 billion through 2031-32. But the commissioners and president responsible for the CFP have yet to agree on anything beyond a 12-team format for the next two seasons, so several days of key meetings have been scheduled.The agreement on terms negotiated by…

As the company struggled, she leveraged the Hamptons estate. The limited liability company associated with the main house, 376 Gin Lane, received a $15 million loan from Morgan Stanley in 2011, according to public records. At around the same time, the second house, 366 Gin Lane, got an $8.5 million infusion from Wells Fargo.In 2016, Ms. Blouin put La Dune on the market. Asking price: $140 million. When there were no takers, she arranged to receive another $26 million in loans from a lender, JGB Management.Over the next few years, because of heavy interest, the amount she owed JGB grew…

DCM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, began investing in China’s start-ups in 1999. The move reaped such blockbuster returns that in 2021, DCM said it planned to “double down” on its strategy of investing in China, the United States and Japan.Yet when DCM set out to raise money last fall for a new fund focused on very young companies and promoted its “cross-Pacific” expertise, the firm described plans to invest in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to a fund-raising memo that was viewed by The New York Times.China was not mentioned.DCM’s messaging is one example…

When Meta shared the raw computer code needed to build a chatbot last year, rival companies said Meta was releasing poorly understood and perhaps even dangerous technology into the world.Now, in an indication that critics of sharing A.I. technology are losing ground to their industry peers, Google is making a similar move. Google released the computer code that powers its online chatbot on Wednesday, after keeping this kind of technology concealed for many months.Much like Meta, Google said the benefits of freely sharing the technology — called a large language model — outweighed the potential risks.The company said in a…

Joy Lorton, 80, has been married and divorced four times.“I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when everybody was supposed to get married and have kids, so I did that,” said Ms. Lorton, who lives in Olympia, Wash., and has three daughters, seven grandchildren and a gaggle of great-grandchildren.But each of her marriages was marred by a different flavor of dysfunction, and since her last divorce in 2001, she has been devoutly and joyfully single. “It all goes back to the same word: freedom,” Ms. Lorton said.Now, she chooses whom she wants to spend time with. And that could…

The team behind the Encores! revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not looking to reinvent George C. Wolfe’s ambitious 1992 Broadway show. But they do hope that this rendition, opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, will introduce the musical to a new generation.Taking that idea a step further, Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he also wanted audiences “to immerse themselves in a joy in a time period that does not exist anymore.”That joy comes via the story of jazz and the works of Jelly Roll Morton, a ragtime pianist who said he invented the…

Amid widespread food shortages and a breakdown in civil order, groups of desperate civilians in Gaza are regularly attempting to ambush aid convoys, according to two Western officials who were recently in the enclave and images of one such ambush reviewed by The New York Times.In the images, several dozen young men, some of them carrying clubs, attempt to block the passage of a convoy of trucks as they drive along a major highway in southern Gaza after entering the territory from Egypt. The trucks are briefly forced off the road as the drivers swerve to avoid hitting the men.…

A day after vetoing calls for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the United States on Wednesday defended Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, arguing at the United Nations’ highest court that Israel faced “very real security needs.”The latest U.S. defense of Israel on the global stage came at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Richard C. Visek, the acting legal adviser at the U.S. State Department, urged a 15-judge panel not to call for Israel’s immediate withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. He said that only the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside…

Cheryl Swoopes said she has spoken with Iowa State guard Caitlin Clark to address her controversial comments about Clark’s record-breaking season.”I reached out to (LSU’s Angel Reese) a few weeks ago and had a really nice conversation with Angel on the phone and sent Caitlin a message. She responded. She and I went back and forth,” Swoopes said on Sunday’s Baylor-Texas Tech broadcast. “I’m not going to share what she said, I’ll leave it to her if she wants to share it. But what I will say is, what I said to her was, ‘I made the mistake of saying…