Author: NY TIMES

Russian authorities have declared that the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died of natural causes but are refusing to release his remains until his family agrees to a “secret funeral,” Mr. Navalny’s mother and his spokeswoman said on Thursday.Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s mother, said she had been “secretly” taken to a morgue Wednesday night, “where they showed me Aleksei.” She was shown a medical report on Mr. Navalny’s death that said he died of natural causes, according to the Navalny team’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh.But Ms. Navalnaya, 69, said she now was locked in a grim battle with local authorities in…

Want to create a living fence? Or maybe you’d like to produce bountiful harvests of leaves and twigs to feed livestock, or simply enliven a winter landscape with fiery color?There’s a willow for that.Lisa Carper and Aric Vanselous have a willow for all of those purposes, and then some. In their trove of a nursery devoted to the genus Salix, they have several hundred species and varieties from around the world.But that was hardly the plan. In early 2019, Ms. Carper was browsing online for plants that might work well at the couple’s former New Jersey property.“We had a little…

Stocks on Wall Street recorded their biggest gain in more than a year on Thursday, a day after Nvidia, which has become an emblem of the growth potential offered by artificial intelligence, reported record profits.The S&P 500 rose 2.1 percent, its best one-day performance since January 2023. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of tech stocks like Nvidia, rose 3 percent, also its biggest one-day jump in over a year.After markets closed on Wednesday, Nvidia, which designs microchips used in the development of artificial intelligence, reported record revenue of over $22 billion for the final three months of 2023.…

Reddit, the community-focused message board site, took a significant step on Thursday toward going public, paving the way for it to be the first major social media company to debut on the stock market in years and a test for private companies after a drought in initial public offerings.In an offering prospectus, Reddit revealed its financial performance in preparation for selling shares to investors. The San Francisco-based company reported that its revenue rose more than 20 percent as its losses narrowed last year, and that it had 73 million daily users.The prospectus kicks off a process to the stock market,…

To the fertility patients whose embryos were destroyed at an Alabama clinic, the circumstances must have been shocking. Somehow, a patient in the hospital housing the clinic had wandered into a storage room, pulled the embryos from a tank of liquid nitrogen, and then dropped them on the floor — probably because the tank was kept at minus 360 degrees.The bizarre episode was at the center of lawsuits filed by three families that eventually reached the Alabama Supreme Court. On Friday, a panel of judges ruled that the embryos destroyed at the clinic should be considered children under state law,…

The armorer who loaded the gun that Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on a film set in 2021 when it fired a live round and killed the movie’s cinematographer is standing trial in New Mexico on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.The trial of the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, marks the first time a trial jury will weigh in on the Oct. 21, 2021, shooting on the set of the film “Rust,” which claimed the life of its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. A grand jury indicted Mr. Baldwin last month on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting; he has pleaded not…

President Biden called Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, a “crazy S.O.B.” during an evening fund-raiser in California, which the Kremlin dismissed as “Hollywood cowboy-style behavior.”“We have a crazy S.O.B. like that guy Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of donors in San Francisco on Wednesday night.Mr. Biden’s comments drew the ire of Moscow, resulting in a blunt tit-for-tat.Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, accused Mr. Biden of performing for his domestic audience.“It is clear that Mr. Biden is demonstrating Hollywood cowboy-style behavior to serve domestic political interests,”…

This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy…

Visit The Times live blog for the latest information on the Odysseus moon lander’s journey, including an updated landing time.On Wednesday morning, a robotic lunar lander launched by a Houston company got closer to reaching the moon.The company, Intuitive Machines, announced that its Odysseus spacecraft had fired its engine for six minutes and 48 seconds, slowing it enough to be pulled by the moon’s gravity into a circular orbit 57 miles above the surface.On Thursday, it is scheduled to touch down on the moon. If all goes well, it will become the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft…

Your cell network is down. Maybe it’s AT&T, which went down for many users on Thursday. Or maybe it’s another service a week, a month or a year from now.But you really need to make a call. How do you do it?The short answer: You need a Wi-Fi connection. If you have that, there are a few ways to get through.Call on Wi-FiFirst, be sure that Wi-Fi calling is turned on in your phone’s settings. iPhone users can turn on Wi-Fi calling by going to Settings, and then activating Wi-Fi calling under the Cellular settings page. Android users can turn…