Author: NY TIMES

Barring another last-minute U-turn, the Women’s Professional Tennis Tour is preparing to announce that its end-of-season WTA Tour finals will be held in Saudi Arabia, marking the latest step in the country’s massive investment in elite sport.WTA Tour CEO Steve Simon has been in talks with Saudi officials for the past year, and if a deal is reached, the 2024 finals would be held there at the end of the season, according to several senior WTA officials. The WTA has been in this situation before, though, just last summer when it came close to reaching a deal with Saudi Arabia…

On Wednesday night, more than 400 people flowed in and out of Sandy Liang’s Lunar New Year party held at Boom, the venue at the top of the Standard High Line Hotel.Some guests wore bright red, to symbolize good luck, but many were in looks adorned with bows and ballet flats, emblems associated with Ms. Liang’s playfully nostalgic namesake fashion brand.The evening was an early celebration of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Feb. 10; Ms. Liang grew up observing the holiday with her family in Queens. This is her second year hosting the event with the chef Danny…

The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.After the loss of 14…

Product placement, one of the oldest tricks in advertisers’ toolbox, is getting an A.I. makeover.New technology has made it easier to insert digital, realistic-looking versions of soda cans and shampoo onto the tables and walls of videos on YouTube and TikTok. And a growing group of creators and advertisers is grabbing at the chance for an additional revenue stream.A recent TikTok from the dancer Melissa Becraft featured a poster for Bubly, the sparkling-water brand owned by PepsiCo, hanging on the wall of her apartment as she shimmied to a Shakira song. A duo known as HiveMind chatted about bands while…

Wayne Kramer, whose explosive guitar playing with the influential Detroit band the MC5 in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to set the template for punk rock, died on Friday. He was 75.The death was confirmed in a post on his official Instagram account, which said the cause was pancreatic cancer. It did not say where he died.The MC5 (short for Motor City Five) formed in Lincoln Park, Mich., in 1965.Mr. Kramer and Fred (Sonic) Smith teamed to provide the twin-guitar attack that was at the heart of the band’s sound, and the centerpiece of its notoriously loud and…

Israel’s defense minister has signaled that ground forces will advance toward the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, which has become a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians pushed from their homes by nearly 13 weeks of war.Rafah, which has also been a gateway for humanitarian aid, is a sprawl of tents and makeshift shelters crammed against the border with Egypt. About half of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have piled into and around the city, where about 200,000 people lived before the war, the United Nations said on Friday.The city is one of the last in southern…

The United States on Friday carried out a series of military strikes against Iranian forces and the militias they support in seven sites in Syria and Iraq, marking a sharp escalation of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration has for four months sought to avoid.The airstrikes, targeting command and control operations, intelligence centers, weapons facilities and bunkers used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force and affiliated militia groups, made good on President Biden’s promise to respond to a drone attack in Jordan on Sunday that killed three American soldiers and injured at least 40…

In the baseball world, the reaction to the Baltimore Orioles’ $1.725 billion valuation has been surprising and sometimes disbelieving.Seven industry analysts and competitor officials all used the same word to describe the price:”low.”The Orioles officially announced Wednesday that they are selling the team to a group led by David Rubenstein, a Baltimore native who founded the private equity firm Carlyle Group. According to Puck News, which first reported the sale, Rubinstein Group will initially buy about 40% of the club. The group will have the option of taking full control after Peter Angelos’ death, pending MLB approval, according to sources…

There’s an inevitable timeline to virality. First there is the burgeoning fame, then the ubiquitous online affection, followed by a fall from digital grace. We’ve seen it happen over and over. Remember Ken Bone, the gentleman in a red sweater who won hearts during a presidential debate in 2016? It wasn’t long before internet sleuths unearthed his unsavory Reddit history. TikTok’s favorite emu farmer? You already know where this is headed. (In internet parlance, these characters are often referred to as “milkshake ducks.”)Now, Campbell and Jett Puckett are experiencing the latter half of this timeline.The Pucketts, a married couple who…

“I feel like I’m in a fairy tale,” Sean Wang said to the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah, last month for his Sundance Film Festival debut.Mr. Wang, a 29-year-old filmmaker, was dressed in a black suit and white Vans (a nod to his skateboarding roots). He grabbed his chest in a show of how fast his heart was beating as he introduced his film, “Dìdi.” It is a coming-of-age story about an angsty, insecure 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy trying to find his place in the world.“I’m just going to take a few seconds to…