Author: NY TIMES

Intense bombardment of a Gaza Strip city filled with refugees flattened a large mosque and killed or wounded scores of people on Thursday as Israel repeated its intention to push into the area with ground forces if Hamas does not release hostages before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.Nearly 100 people were killed across the enclave from Israeli strikes over the past day, the Gazan health authorities said Thursday, bringing the total death toll after almost 20 weeks of war to nearly 30,000.Around half of the Gaza Strip’s population of 2.3 million people are crammed into the…

In 1999, an up-and-coming software engineer in Switzerland was preparing for a conference in France when he learned that the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, a pioneer in the field, was also attending and would be on the same flight.The engineer, Kent Beck, had never met Dr. Wirth. But, he recalled in an interview, upon arriving at the airport he told the gate agent: “My colleague Professor Wirth and I are flying together. Would it be possible for us to sit together?”Mr. Beck, who would eventually become a well-known programmer in his own right, said that sitting next to Dr.…

Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race.Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate images of any people and has vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions.“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a statement posted to X on Thursday. “While we do this, we’re going to pause…

The Italian director Matteo Garrone has a talent for cruelty. There’s always been more to Garrone’s movies than unkindness, but he has a striking facility for crystallizing human baseness in images that are both specific and laden with surplus meaning. When I think of “Gomorrah,” his 2008 drama about a Neapolitan criminal syndicate, I immediately re-see the shot of two dead teenagers in the bucket of a bulldozer — a grotesque Pietà.Two very different adolescents figure in “Io Capitano,” which tracks a pair of Senegalese cousins as they struggle to make their way from their home in Dakar to Europe.…

In late April 2015, while on a reporting trip to Moscow, I paid a visit to the offices of the anti-corruption campaign run by Aleksei Navalny.At the time, his political party was preparing for Russia’s 2016 elections, and his international profile was growing. To many, he seemed to be the one prospective leader who might offer Russia a different path — a possibility that seemed all the more significant after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a well-known liberal politician and critic of President Vladimir Putin, in February 2015.I didn’t meet Navalny, but I…

After years of renting, Jackson Owens and Flora Jin bought a loft in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and it felt like the stuff of dreams. A week or so later, it was more like a nightmare.A few floors above them there was a gas leak, then an explosion. When the sprinklers came on, many of the building’s apartments were drenched, including the couple’s new 1,200-square-foot condo, which they’d bought for about $1.1 million in July 2021.“Our unit had severe water damage,” said Mr. Owens, 32, a software engineer. “It was quite an introduction to homeownership.”They moved out, shuttling between hotel rooms and…

Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off several hundreds of its more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to a company memo sent to staff on Thursday from Bruce Dixon, the chief executive.The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the…

The Chinese hacking tools made public in recent days illustrate how much Beijing has expanded the reach of its computer infiltration campaigns through the use of a network of contractors, as well as the vulnerabilities of its emerging system.The new revelations underscore the degree to which China has ignored, or evaded, American efforts for more than a decade to curb its extensive hacking operations. Instead, China has both built the cyberoperations of its intelligence services and developed a spider web of independent companies to do the work.Last weekend in Munich, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said that hacking operations…

The New York attorney general on Thursday urged the Food and Drug Administration to “take immediate action” and renew alerts to doctors and patients about the dangerous effects of Singulair for children, saying that the current warnings about the drug’s psychiatric side effects were not sufficient.In a letter, the attorney general, Letitia James, also called on the federal agency to consider discouraging the prescription of Singulair, an asthma and allergy drug, to children.Thousands of patients and parents have complained to the F.D.A. about symptoms of anxiety, rage, hallucinations and other psychiatric problems that they linked to the drug, which is…

The involuntary manslaughter trial of the armorer who loaded the gun Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of “Rust” when it fired, killing the movie’s cinematographer, began on Thursday with prosecutors accusing her of performing “sloppy and incomplete” safety checks of the weapon and of being responsible for the presence of live rounds on the set.During opening arguments one of the prosecutors told the jury that the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had treated gun safety protocols on the film set “as if they were optional,” leading her to miss the fact that she had loaded a live round into…