Author: NY TIMES

Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is hard to escape. It’s the one day of the year when all of Instagram is deluged with proud displays of affection and shops are filled with people buying last-minute gifts.And there was no shortage of pink and red roses, hearts and chocolates in Manhattan, where residents and tourists from Harlem to the West Village had a lot to say about how they planned to celebrate. For the entire day, we hopscotched around neighborhoods, visited popular attractions and even ventured to the top of a skyscraper to capture the scene.In Times Square at…

President Biden is facing new pressure to block Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the iconic manufacturer U.S. Steel, this time from environmental groups that say the tie-up would set back America’s efforts to curb climate change.In interviews, environmental activists working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions say the merger would bring together two steel giants that are laggards on transitioning away from fossil fuels.Researchers at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit pushing to decarbonize steel and other heavy industries, drew on both companies’ public disclosures to calculate that Nippon and U.S. Steel are relatively high emitters of heat-trapping gases from steel production. Both companies…

The F.B.I., working with other countries, disrupted a Russian hacking operation that infiltrated more than 1,000 home and small-business internet routers in the United States and around the world, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.Russian intelligence, collaborating with cybercriminals, created a botnet, or a network of private computers infected with malicious software, to spy on military and security organizations and private corporations in countries like the United States.Using a court order, the F.B.I. secretly copied and deleted stolen data and malware from hacked routers. Doing this stopped Russia’s ability to use the routers without affecting how they function, officials said.…

As women have begun having babies later in life, the number of patients going through in vitro fertilization treatment has increased significantly.The medical treatment can be life-changing, but it also comes at a price, as some couples go deeply into debt to pay for medical care that health insurance does not always cover. Some research has questioned the effectiveness of newer aspects of fertility treatment, like genetic screenings, and some patients have filed lawsuits claiming that faulty chemicals destroyed their embryos. Private equity companies, seeing the industry’s rapid growth, have been buying up some of the country’s largest fertility clinics.The…

This week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, which was a showcase for his biggest hits and his obsession with small detailsThe announcement of Beyoncé’s imminent return with a pair of songs suggesting her long rumored country turn is afootTaylor Swift’s big day at the Super Bowl“Vultures 1,” the new album from Ye and Ty Dolla $ign (or ¥$) and how it intersects with Ye’s recent public misbehaviorsNew songs from Mk.gee and Chief Keef & Mike Will Made-ItSnack of the…

International alarm over Israel’s plans for a ground offensive in Rafah, in southern Gaza, has intensified in recent days, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to press ahead with plans to invade the city near the Egyptian border.Over half of the Gaza Strip’s entire population of more than two million is sheltering in Rafah, according to the United Nations, an area of about 25 square miles. Many of them were repeatedly pushed southward by Israeli military orders to move into so-called safe zones. They are now trapped against Gaza’s southernmost edge, largely living in makeshift tents with little food or…

Israel sent troops on Thursday into Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in what it said was a search for Hamas fighters and the bodies of hostages, an incursion that raised alarm over the fate of hundreds of patients and medical workers and the many displaced Palestinians who had sought shelter there from the war.The raid came two days after Israel’s military ordered displaced people to evacuate the hospital, the largest in southern Gaza and one of the last ones functioning in the enclave, and after warnings by health officials that a military operation there could be…

Yes, it’s yet another show of A.I.-generated art — but wait! The software known as AARON isn’t like other A.I.’s. Its developer, the British painter Harold Cohen — being an artist — understood that A.I. isn’t a shortcut to interesting art. It’s a tool, ultimately only as good as its user.Selections from the paintings Cohen made with AARON, on view at the Whitney Museum, represent their man-machine team’s increasingly sophisticated style. The early pictures, from the 1970s, were limited to abstract, wavering linework and crosshatched blobs — the available computing power couldn’t manage much more — which AARON drew with…

The head of the Internal Revenue Service warned on Thursday that proposed cuts to his agency’s budget would ultimately cost the federal government more money and pushed back against accusations that he had been disregarding laws for political purposes.The comments by the I.R.S. commissioner, Daniel Werfel, came in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee as he approaches his first full year on the job. He has been overseeing a $60 billion overhaul of the tax collection agency. That funding, under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, had been scaled back from $80 billion, and Republican lawmakers are seeking…

In April, a New York start-up called Runway AI unveiled technology that let people generate videos, like a cow at a birthday party or a dog chatting on a smartphone, simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.The four-second videos were blurry, choppy, distorted and disturbing. But they were a clear sign that artificial intelligence technologies would generate increasingly convincing videos in the months and years to come.Just 10 months later, the San Francisco start-up OpenAI has unveiled a similar system that creates videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. A…