Author: NY TIMES

Law enforcement officials are bracing for an explosion of material generated by artificial intelligence that realistically depicts children being sexually exploited, deepening the challenge of identifying victims and combating such abuse.The concerns come as Meta, a primary resource for the authorities in flagging sexually explicit content, has made it tougher to track criminals by encrypting its messaging service. The complication underscores the tricky balance technology companies must strike in weighing privacy rights against children’s safety. And the prospect of prosecuting that type of crime raises thorny questions of whether such images are illegal and what kind of recourse there may…

On a cold afternoon in early January, the pianist Ursula Oppens was making an album at Brooklyn College.At 79, Oppens is a little fragile, tiny and stooped. But when she sat down at the piano — shoes off, Diet Coke on the floor — out came playing of power and technical aplomb.Most of the time, at least. Oppens was setting down the first recording of an early, unpublished sonata by the uncompromising modernist Charles Wuorinen, and, like much of Wuorinen’s music, it was treacherously thorny. She had been studying it, on and off, for a year, but it was still…

The post by the Palestine Red Crescent was a haunting plea, hoping to learn the fate of three people not heard from for five days.“Where is Hind? Where are Ahmed and Yousef? We need to know,” it said.Two of the group’s rescuers were dispatched on Monday to find 6-year-old Hind Rajab, believed to be trapped in a vehicle in northern Gaza with a number of dead family members.The Red Crescent said one of its workers had spoken extensively by phone with Hind on Monday and that it believed that all six of her relatives inside the vehicle with her had…

It is not quite right to say that this has been a quiet January for soccer’s billion-dollar transfer business. The month’s ordinary soundtrack — whispers gathering, phones pinging, the machine that produces vivid chyrons for breathless television broadcasts whirring to life — might have been muted, but that does not mean there has been nothing to hear. Listen carefully, and you might make out the sound of a bubble bursting.The January transfer market is supposed to be many things, particularly in the Premier League, a place where the money flows in such great torrents that it eventually papers over almost…

Pero la forma en que te vistes es una declaración de quién eres y cómo quieres que te perciban. Y eso cambia a medida que vamos creciendo, incluso más, a veces, que nuestros cuerpos o tallas de vestido (aunque esos, por supuesto, también cambian).En lo personal, siento que me ha costado ganar mis años, y la experiencia vale la pena llevarla puesta. Lo que significa que me he despedido de la ropa que por lo general asocio con mi juventud: dobladillos por encima de las rodillas (especialmente en faldas del estilo que llevan patinadoras y porristas), tops que enseñan mi…

For many years, one financial aid principle seemed fair enough: If you had two or more family members in college at the same time, the aid formula would let you take the money you could afford to pay and divide it among the number of people in school.But on Jan. 1, a new federal law went into effect, and the formula changed. A million families with, say, two or more siblings in college simultaneously could pay thousands of dollars more per year as a result.Now, colleges face a choice: Make up any shortfall with their own money, or cross their…

Hours before Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, was set to testify on Wednesday about child safety online, lawmakers released internal documents showing how his company had rejected calls to bulk up on resources to combat the problem.In 90 pages of internal emails from fall 2021, top officials at Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, debated the addition of dozens of engineers and other employees to focus on children’s well-being and safety. One proposal to Mr. Zuckerberg for 45 new staff members was declined.The documents, which are being released in full for the first time, were cited in a…

In New York, Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, is preparing to say goodbye: Farewell concerts under the banner “Celebrate Jaap!” are planned over the next few months before his brief, pandemic-interrupted tenure ends this summer.But in Seoul, where van Zweden officially began a five-year term as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director this month, a new chapter is taking shape. Last week he led sold-out performances of Beethoven and Mahler with the ensemble, his first concerts as music director.“We had this feeling of trying to go to the next level,” van Zweden said in an interview…

Basil Ghazawi was paralyzed and had been treated in the hospital’s rehabilitation ward since late October, Dr. Nazzal said. The Israeli military said that he and Mohammed Ghazawi “hid inside the hospital.”Basil Ghazawi was wounded in his spinal column by shrapnel from an Israeli drone strike on Oct. 25, Dr. Nazzal said. That could not be independently confirmed, but the Israeli military said at the time that a drone had fired on Palestinian gunmen who had hurled explosive devices and fired on Israeli soldiers in Jenin. It did not name Mr. Ghazawi.Surging violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where millions…

For more than 20 years, the British adventurer Alastair Humphreys roamed the planet. He rowed across the Atlantic, traversed India on foot, cycled around the world. In his lovely essay “A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime,” published last month, he writes that climate change and familial commitments have caused him to narrow his horizons of late, to seek diversion in his own backyard, “on the fringes of a city in an unassuming landscape, pocked by a glow of sodium lights and the rush of busy roads.”To begin this exploration, Humphreys orders a map of his neck of…