Author: NY TIMES

Ricky Valero walked into a mostly empty showing of “Madame Web” with a bucket of popcorn and an open mind.He had some idea of what he was getting into. The movie, which stars Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant character from the Spider-Man comics, has been gleefully panned in the week since its release.The reviews were lousy, with critics calling the movie “a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster” that is “full of bad dialogue delivered badly.” The box office numbers were somehow worse, landing “Madame Web” among the lowest ticket sales ever for a superhero movie.The movie has been jeered on social media,…

Federal Reserve officials welcomed a recent inflation slowdown at their last meeting in late January but were intent on proceeding carefully as they tiptoe toward rate cuts, according to minutes from that gathering, which were released on Wednesday.Central bankers raised interest rates sharply from March 2022 to July 2023, pushing them to 5.3 percent from a starting point near zero. Those moves were meant to cool consumer and business demand, which officials hoped would weigh down rapid inflation.Now, inflation is slowing meaningfully. Consumer prices climbed 3.1 percent in the year through January, down sharply from their recent peak of 9.1…

Hydeia Broadbent, who was born with H.I.V. and as a child became a leading voice in raising awareness about the virus and AIDS, died on Tuesday at her home in Las Vegas. She was 39.Her father, Loren Broadbent, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Ms. Broadbent was 6 years old when she began sharing her struggle with H.I.V. on television programs, aiming to educate the public amid an epidemic that produced panic and stigma around AIDS, according to her website.In 1992, when she was 7, Ms. Broadbent was interviewed opposite Magic Johnson, the basketball star who after his own H.I.V.…

Contemporary works will be front and center in the coming season, the Metropolitan Opera announced on Wednesday, with four company premieres among its six new productions.The 2024-25 season will open in September with “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare, by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, and will also feature the modern works “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer; “Ainadamar,” by Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang and “Antony and Cleopatra,” by John Adams. It will be the fifth opera by Adams that the Met has presented, putting him in the same category as Tchaikovsky and Bellini.There will also…

Syrian state media reported on Wednesday that an airstrike on a residential building in Damascus had killed two people, and said that Israel was responsible for the attack.The Israeli military declined to comment on the strike, which the Syrian government’s official SANA news agency said hit a building in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood just after 9:30 a.m. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in Syria, said that a third person had been killed by shrapnel from the attack, which also damaged surrounding buildings.A strike last February in the same neighborhood killed at least five people.…

Visiting American lawmakers sought to assure Taiwan on Thursday that the United States would stand by it in the face of pressure from China, while warning that uncertainty over proposed new military aid for Ukraine could weaken U.S. efforts to deter Beijing from moving aggressively against the island democracy.“America stands with Taiwan, and you can draw upon a deep reservoir of friendship and support from the United States Congress,” Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican leading the bipartisan House delegation, told Taiwan’s president-elect, Lai Ching-te, who takes office in May.The lawmakers also met with Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen. Journalists…

A year ago at the NFL Scouting Combine, Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles announced that his team was open for business — the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft was available.”We need a lot, and (the No. 1 pick) gives us more opportunities to bring in more players,” Poland said at the time. “It’s a good situation for our club.”The combine then became an information-gathering mission for the Poles and Bruins. They need to do their due diligence on the quarterback class, which includes interviews with Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud and Anthony Richardson.But Pole also needed to make…

The pull of fashion mythology — the current obsession with Dior-era John Galliano or the Apple TV+ mini-series “The New Look” — suggests we are at peak nostalgia. It makes one wonder why someone hasn’t done a book or a documentary on Romeo Gigli. His story has all the ingredients of a blockbuster mini-series.His star ascended in the early 1990s, when Mr. Gigli’s romantic yet rigorous designs provided an antidote to the high-octane excess of the ’80s. But it all too quickly imploded in a haze of legal acrimony, the cautionary tale of unbounded creativity vanquished by brute commerce. More…

A cache of documents from a Chinese security firm working for Chinese government agencies showed an extensive effort to hack many foreign governments and telecommunications firms, particularly in Asia, as well as targets of the country’s domestic surveillance apparatus.The documents, which were posted to a public website last week, revealed an eight-year effort to target databases and tap communications in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and elsewhere in Asia. The files also revealed a campaign to monitor closely the activities of ethnic minorities in China and online gambling companies.The files included records of apparent correspondence between employees as…

Beyoncé’s new country single “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country airplay chart this week, making her the first Black female artist to hold the top spot.Beyoncé’s other single, “16 Carriages,” released simultaneously on Feb. 11, also debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard country chart. The songs reached No. 2 and No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Texas Hold ’Em” has already drawn more than 19 million streams, and “16 Carriages” has 10.3 million streams.Historically, Black artists have struggled to gain recognition in the genre of country music, a field often dominated by white male…