Author: NY TIMES

For a jukebox musical set in 1965 New York City — that tackles feminism, civil rights activism and the Vietnam War — “A Sign of the Times” sure includes a lot of songs by the British singer Petula Clark. When the lead characters turn up at a party hosted by Randy Forthwall, an artsy type in a silver-white fright wig (would Andy Schmarhol have been too on the nose?), he even complains that Clark is a no-show.She may not have made it to Randy’s shindig, but her hits are all over this show, including “Downtown,” “Color My World,” “I Know…

The large-scale military strikes the United States has directed at the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group in Yemen that has disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, has forced the Biden administration to wrestle over what it can do without congressional approval.The question has helped fuel at least two major legal policy dilemmas, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations among national security lawyers: One is how a Vietnam-era law that was intended to limit wars that lack congressional authorization applies to the conflict, and the other is what to do with captured detainees.On Thursday, a senior administration official offered the…

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…