Author: NY TIMES

As if sticker shock in grocery stores hasn’t been enough, inflation has hit another consumer favorite: Girl Scout cookies.When Girl Scouts in New York start their annual cookie sales this week, customers will be paying $7 a box for favorites like Thin Mints, Samoas, and Tagalongs, up from $5 last year.“It has been six years since we’ve done a cookie price increase,” said Meridith Maskara, the chief executive of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, which represents 25,000 members across the city’s five boroughs. “Girl Scouts are not immune to the rising costs of life.”Across the country, Girl Scout…

On a sweltering July evening, the din from thousands of computers mining for Bitcoins pierced the night. Nearby, Matt Brown, a member of the Arkansas legislature, monitored the noise alongside a local magistrate.As the two men investigated complaints about the operation, Mr. Brown said, a security guard for the mine loaded rounds into an AR-15-style assault rifle that had been stored in a car.“He wanted to make sure that we knew he had his gun — that we knew it was loaded,” Mr. Brown, a Republican, said in an interview.The Bitcoin outfit here, 45 minutes north of Little Rock, is…

When TikTok users open the app these days, they encounter a platform stripped of music by many of their favorite artists. Dancers bob and sway without a beat drop. People lip-sync to silence.Because of a licensing rift between the platform and Universal Music Group, which releases music by Playboi Carti, Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande and others, TikTok confirmed on Thursday that it had deleted music by Universal artists from its library and muted previously published videos that used those songs.Music from artists affiliated with Sony and Warner remains available on TikTok. But that did not stop some users from…

For Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, the conflict in Gaza has come home.Protesters angry over Israel’s assault on Gaza have become a regular presence outside Mr. Blinken’s residence in Northern Virginia, with some camping out for days in roadside tents. Palestinian flags and handmade signs express their fury at a diplomat who has become the face of President Biden’s policy toward the conflict.“Bloody Blinken lives here,” read one this week. “Caution: War Criminal Inside,” read another. Passing cars drove over the words “Secretary of genocide” scrawled along the road in pastel chalk colors.And when Mr. Blinken’s official motorcade pulled…

Two years ago, Bank of America won kudos from climate activists for saying it would no longer finance new coal mines, coal-burning power plants or Arctic drilling projects because of the toll they take on the environment.The bank’s latest environment and social-risk policy reneged on those commitments. The policy, updated in December, says that such projects will instead be subject to “enhanced due diligence.”Bank of America’s change follows intensifying backlash from Republican lawmakers against corporations that consider environmental and social factors in their operations. Wall Street in particular has come under fire for what some Republicans have called “woke capitalism,”…

On an island where the average home sale topped $4 million last year, Ginger Andrews’s scallop shanty is a golden ticket.If she had any inclination, Ms. Andrews, a fourth-generation resident of Nantucket, could sell the waterfront structure next week for a life-changing amount of money. The prospect is intoxicating — at least to some of her acquaintances.“They’ll say, ‘You could have a chef!’” Ms. Andrews said. “‘Or, ‘Don’t you want to travel around the world?’”But she has a different goal: defending her weatherworn, 19th-century shack against buyers who would gut its unadorned interior, install modern layouts and luxuries, and erase…

Tesla is recalling about 2.2 million vehicles because the font on the warning lights panel was too small to comply with safety standards, U.S. regulators said on Friday.“Warning lights with a smaller font size can make critical safety information on the instrument panel difficult to read, increasing the risk of a crash,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice.The recall is one of several that Tesla has made in recent years, a setback for the company, the dominant maker of electric vehicles in the United States. In another hurdle for Tesla, the safety administration said in a…

Christopher A. Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned on Wednesday that China was ramping up an extensive hacking operation geared at taking down the United States’ power grid, oil pipelines and water systems in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.Mr. Wray, appearing before a House subcommittee on China, offered an alarming assessment of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts. Its intent is to sow confusion, sap the United States’ will to fight and hamper the American military from deploying resources if the dispute over Taiwan, a major flashpoint between the two superpowers, escalates into a war, he…

The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is a garish explosion, its imagery drawn from cartoons and the Keystone Kops, its madcap energy never-ending. It’s fabulous, but the score can feel whooshed into a blender’s whirlwind.That was very much not the case on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra played “Lady Macbeth” in concert. Even with some bits of staging, Boston’s performance under its music director, Andris Nelsons, was undistracted: firmly, soberly clear and controlled.Shostakovich has been a yearslong focus of this ensemble and conductor. They approach the composer with a poise that reveals…

The Israeli military said Tuesday that it had begun pumping water into the vast network of tunnels beneath Gaza, which Hamas has used to launch attacks, store weapons and imprison Israeli hostages.The military “has implemented new capabilities to neutralize underground terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza Strip by channeling large volumes of water into the tunnels,” the Israeli military said in a statement.The statement was the military’s first public acknowledgment that its engineers were flooding tunnels, a contentious strategy that some military officials have said is ineffective and that the U.N. has warned could damage Gaza’s drinking water and sewage systems.Even…