Author: NY TIMES

For decades, managers of electric grids feared that surging energy demand on hot summer days would force blackouts. Increasingly, they now have similar concerns about the coldest days of winter.Largely because of growing demand from homes and businesses, and supply constraints thanks to aging utility equipment, many grids are under greater strain in winter. By 2033, the growth in electricity demand during winter, compared with the current level, is expected to exceed the growth in demand in summer, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit organization that develops and enforces standards for the utility industry.Just 10 years…

Last October, to commemorate Mental Health Awareness Week, a group of students at Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram, Maine, created the annual Hope Board. Shaped like an enormous tulip and displayed in the lobby, the board was covered with anonymous teenage aspirations. Some students hoped to pass driver’s education or have a successful playoff season. Others expressed more complicated desires. “To be more happy than angry,” wrote one student. Another wrote, “I hope people are kinder and more mature.”Camryn Baron, 17, created the board as a founder of Sacopee’s Yellow Tulip Team, a student group devoted to mental health.…

“Some Like It Hot,” a new jazz age musical adaptation of the classic 1959 Billy Wilder film, won a Grammy Award on Sunday for best musical theater album.It was adapted from the classic movie comedy in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play two musicians who dress as women to escape the mob.The show, a big and lush production, had a hard time on Broadway and closed in December at a loss after a one-year run. But the score was praised, with the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green writing that the first-act songs “are pretty much all knockouts.”The…

The highway is the most politically charged slice of a politically turbulent country. It winds 180 miles from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, through the fertile plains of Punjab Province to Lahore, the nation’s cultural and political heart.For centuries, it was known only as a sliver of the Grand Trunk Road, Asia’s longest and oldest thoroughfare, linking traders in Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. But in Pakistan, this stretch of the smog-drenched highway has become the stage for major rallies and protests led by nearly every famed civilian leader the country has had.As Pakistan heads into national elections on Thursday, the…

The year is 2045. The fourth week of February. After 21 grueling weeks of the regular season and five rounds of the playoffs, the Super Bowl has been decided: the Buffalo Bills vs. the London Jaguars. The NFL expects 130 million viewers to watch the game on Netflix, the exclusive home of the Super Bowl after the NFL signed a multibillion-dollar deal with the league through 2040.Those who don’t subscribe to the streaming service can pay $149 for a one-month trial, which includes access to the game via one of Netflix’s 10 Megacast Super Bowl broadcasts. A popular Megacast option…

A federal official said Monday that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were university employees, clearing a path for the team to take a vote that could make it the first unionized college sports program in the country.In a statement, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in Boston, Laura Sacks, said that because Dartmouth had “the right to control the work” of the team and because the team did that work “in exchange for compensation” like equipment and game tickets, the players were employees under the National Labor Relations Act.A date for the election on whether to unionize…

A patient checks into the hospital for a routine procedure to treat an enlarged prostate. And, unexpectedly, a test done in the hospital — perhaps a blood test or an X-ray or an examination of the urethra and the bladder — finds a cancer.Apparently, something like that happened to King Charles III. When the British monarch was treated for an enlarged prostate in January, doctors found a cancer that the palace said is not prostate cancer. Charles started treatment Monday. The palace did not disclose what had led to the king’s diagnosis.While some prostate specialists like Dr. Peter Albertsen at…

It can feel easy to cast a swift judgment on the composer Oliver Leith. First, there are his titles, such as “Uh huh, Yeah,” “Bendy Broken Telemann No.3,” and “yhyhyhyhyh.” Then, there is the inspiration for his sounds, in which everyday objects like glass bottles and cereal bowls are considered intensely, becoming weird instruments themselves.But if Leith seems flippant, he rejects that characterization entirely.“People talk about irony in society all the time now, and I find that a little dull,” Leith said in an interview. “It’s a very British way of looking at things. Like, ‘Oh, are you being serious…

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the main aid agency in Gaza, is set to lose $65 million by the end of February as donors’ funding cuts begin to kick in, according to internal accounting documents reviewed by The New York Times.At least 18 states or institutions, including many of the agency’s biggest funders, announced they were suspending their donations to the agency, known as UNRWA, after accusations emerged last month that several employees participated in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.Some of those suspensions will take time to take effect. Countries deliver their donations at intervals…

Russia has allowed the release of millions of dollars in frozen North Korean assets and may be helping its isolated ally with access to international banking networks, assistance that has come after the North’s transfer of weapons to Moscow for use against Ukraine, according to American-allied intelligence officials.The White House said last month that it had evidence that North Korea had provided ballistic missiles to Russia, and that the North was seeking military hardware in return. Pyongyang also appears to have shipped up to 2.5 million rounds of ammunition, according to an analysis by a British security think tank.While it…