Author: NY TIMES

At President Trump’s inauguration, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, was relegated to the overflow room while other tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took prime spots on the dais under the Capitol rotunda.But days earlier, before flying into Washington, Mr. Altman was on the phone with Mr. Trump, preparing an announcement that would outflank Mr. Musk and put Mr. Altman’s company at the center of the new administration’s agenda for artificial intelligence.On the 25-minute call, Mr. Altman appealed to Mr. Trump’s love of a big story and of a big deal. Mr. Altman told the president-elect…

Susan F. Wood, a women’s health expert who resigned in protest from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, accusing the agency of knuckling under to politics by not approving over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill known as Plan B, died on Jan. 17 at her home in London. She was 66.The cause was the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme, said Richard Payne, her husband.Dr. Wood was assistant commissioner for women’s health at the F.D.A. during the presidency of George W. Bush when Plan B, a form of emergency contraception, became a flashpoint in the abortion wars.An F.D.A. advisory panel voted…

Susan Alcorn, an experimental composer and musician who pushed the pedal steel guitar, an instrument more often associated with the country music roadhouse, into the avant-garde, died on Friday in Baltimore. She was 71.Her husband, David Lobato, said the cause of death, in a hospital, had not been determined.A rare female virtuoso on an instrument long dominated by men, Ms. Alcorn erased boundaries for pedal steel guitar — a console-style electric guitar played face up, with pedals and knee levers to alter pitch, often used to create a forlorn, wailing twang. That made it a key instrument in country music.As…

Hamas released three more Israeli hostages on Saturday as part of an exchange for Palestinian prisoners, in a highly theatrical handover in which the men were made to give speeches effectively at gunpoint.The hostage release is the fifth in a tense series of exchanges that are part of a 42-day cease-fire deal that went into effect last month pausing the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Hamas agreed to incrementally release 33 of the nearly 100 remaining hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel and a partial Israeli withdrawal.Here’s a closer look at the Israelis released on…

Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.Now, that network is unraveling. The Trump administration froze foreign aid for 90 days and has planned to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development to just 5 percent of its work force, although a federal judge paused the plan on Friday. Given wars and strapped economies, other governments or philanthropies…

President Trump has made clear his animus toward mainstream media organizations. Now he’s getting more personal.Mr. Trump and his key lieutenant, Elon Musk, who has been empowered to run what they call the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee,” have attacked journalists by name in recent days on the social media platforms they own: Truth Social and X.On his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump called for The Washington Post to fire Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and labeled him “incompetent.” Mr. Trump frequently posts on the account to his millions of followers and regularly…

The video falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine appeared to be a clip from E!News, though it never appeared on the entertainment channel.In fact, the video first surfaced on X in a post from an account that researchers have said spreads Russian disinformation. Within hours it drew the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted it. So did President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.They amplified the false video as Mr. Musk pressed a crusade to shut down U.S.A.I.D., the agency that has…

All live bird markets in New York City and in several nearby counties must close temporarily in hopes of curbing the spread of bird flu, which was detected at some of the markets in the past week, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Friday.The order, which came from the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, affects the roughly 80 live markets in New York City and in Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Seven cases of bird flu had been detected at markets in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn.Markets with confirmed cases must get rid of their inventory, while those where bird…

Kendrick Lamar performs like someone parceling out a secret. On the 2015 single “King Kunta,” he stage-whispers, “I swore I wouldn’t tell,” and then proceeds to flaunt industry gossip without naming names. Though the Grammy-hoarding, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has mastered literary opacity in his music — he’s a generous user of perspective shifts and allusion — in videos and in live performances, Lamar’s expressive stagings strike like visual poetry.Lamar has scaled up those performances, becoming more elaborate as his platforms have grown in the 14 years since his recording debut. Dave Free, his primary creative partner and a collaborator on…

The Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, according to U.S. officials and workers for humanitarian groups funded by the agency.Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.With almost all U.S.A.I.D. staff set to be placed on administrative leave by Friday night, there will be only a handful of…