Author: NY TIMES

The pressure on Egypt is building.More than half of Gaza’s population is squeezed into miserable tent cities in Rafah, a small city along Egypt’s border, left with nowhere else to go by Israel’s military campaign.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has threatened to overrun the area, and on Friday, he directed his forces to plan the evacuation of civilians from Rafah to clear the way for a new offensive against Hamas.But it is not clear where those people could go.Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the onslaught, as it has done for people fleeing other…

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A 6-year-old Palestinian girl and the two rescuers who went looking for her nearly two weeks ago were found dead on Saturday, the Palestine Red Crescent said, ending a desperate effort to discover their fates.Two rescuers with the Red Crescent were dispatched in an ambulance on the evening of Jan. 29 to find Hind Rajab, who was believed to be trapped in a vehicle in Gaza City with six dead family members. The aid group said they had been killed by Israeli fire.A Red Crescent statement on Saturday accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived “just meters…

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The sun had gone down on the first day of New York Fashion Week — which also happened to be the first day of the whole fashion season — when Willy Chavarria invited everyone to a drive-in on the far reaches of Greenpoint, Brooklyn.OK, not exactly a drive-in; more like a walk-in, but you get the idea. An old warehouse was bathed in a red light, and there were roses on every chair. Julia Fox, wearing a lavish white robe, Vermeer hat and not much else, chatted to Amanda Lepore and Sam Smith. Then a screen came down on a…

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But there’s something else here. It seems that Wenders’s eye, like Hirayama’s, snagged on the shadows. The canopies of trees are omnipresent in the film, seeping into Hirayama’s dreams at night, which Wenders renders in hazy black and white.There’s a word in Japanese that transliterates to “komorebi” and refers to a phenomenon for which there is no single word in English: the quality of light as it filters through foliage. Hirayama’s life and mind are full of shadows, despite the sunlight he keeps reaching for. The light of komorebi is not full brightness — it is glistening, ever-changing, full of…

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A 6-year-old Palestinian girl and the two rescuers who went looking for her nearly two weeks ago were found dead on Saturday, the Palestine Red Crescent said, ending a desperate effort to discover their fates.Two rescuers with the Red Crescent were dispatched in an ambulance on the evening of Jan. 29 to find Hind Rajab, who was believed to be trapped in a vehicle in Gaza City with six dead family members. The aid group said they had been killed by Israeli fire.A Red Crescent statement on Saturday accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived “just meters…

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Scientists have found pieces of a meteorite that fell near Berlin just after midnight on Jan. 21. It is a rare find, from an asteroid that was identified just before it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Only a handful of such events in the recent past have allowed astronomers to trace an incoming rock’s origin in the solar system.Early analysis of the fragments has shown something equally rare. The meteorite is an aubrite, a class with unknown origins that some scientists argue may be pieces of the planet Mercury. They are so rare that they made up just 80 of the 70,000…

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Our elementary school was set deep in the rural Ontario countryside, nestled in the forest beside the local dump. In the late 1990s, when I was in sixth grade, the school had a drug bust in which more than 20 kids were suspended and charged with possession of marijuana, magic mushrooms and ecstasy. I was not one of those kids.I was a shy, self-conscious, straight-A student who had never been in anything resembling trouble. At recess, a year later, I didn’t make the choice to get into trouble that day, either. My fearless, if inconsiderate, friend Ashley did that for…

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In the early 1980s, 19-year-old Jordan Belfort — who would go on to become known as the Wolf of Wall Street, a title he bestowed on himself in a tell-all memoir — had a fortuitous encounter on Jones Beach, on Long Island, with another teenager selling ice cream named Stephen Drescher.The two became friends. Prosecutors would later note their shared hustling spirit, a drive for entrepreneurialism that curdled into a drive for grift. Within a few years, Mr. Belfort started building a pump-and-dump stock-scam empire. He took Mr. Drescher under his wing as he built a boiler room brokerage that…

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For her latest movie, “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a drab, standoffish, occasionally obnoxious office worker. Strangely enough, she found it exciting.“Fran is a woman who loves her job; she loves her routine,” Ridley said in a video interview from London. “She thinks about dying, but she doesn’t want to die. She has just created this very rich inner world for herself because she struggles to connect with people in a real-life way.”Then a new guy moves into a cubicle near hers.“I would not say the film is one of fireworks,” she said. “I would describe…

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