Author: NY TIMES

After nearly two years of false starts, last-ditch proposals and pleas for more time, China Evergrande, a massive property company, has been ordered to dismantle itself. It’s a big moment. Evergrande’s collapse in 2021 sent China’s housing market into a tailspin. The worries in real estate, where most households put their savings, helped tip the economy into a downturn.The scale of Evergrande’s empire is enormous: Its developments cover hundreds of cities. It controls dozens of business and is more than $300 billion in debt — a sum far greater than most believe its assets are worth. The company’s liquidation puts…

I wasn’t expecting to cry as much as I did at “Godzilla Minus One.” The strong word-of-mouth made it sound like an awesome spectacle with cool action courtesy of the scaly title creature. And while there were awe-inducing showdowns with the monster, the Toho International production, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is largely a meditation on sorrow and survival in the wake of World War II.The specter of trauma has long hung over Godzilla, a creature unearthed from slumber by H-bomb testing in the 1954 original. But “Godzilla Minus One” (a black-and-white version is reaching theaters on Friday) further…

Three U.S. service members were killed in Jordan on Sunday and at least 34 others were injured in what the Biden administration said was a drone attack from an Iran-backed militia, the first known American military fatalities from hostile fire in the turmoil spilling over from Israel’s war with Hamas.The attack happened at a remote logistics outpost in northeast Jordan called Tower 22 where the borders of Syria, Iraq and Jordan converge. The one-way attack drone hit near the outpost’s living quarters, causing injuries that ranged from minor cuts to brain trauma, a U.S. military official said.But the deaths of…

Catherine, the Princess of Wales and the wife of Prince William, has returned home from a London hospital almost two weeks after undergoing abdominal surgery, Kensington Palace said in a statement on Monday.She will convalesce at home for two to three months, according to her office at the palace, and will not return to official duties until after Easter, which falls on March 31 this year.“The Princess of Wales has returned home to Windsor to continue her recovery from surgery. She is making good progress,” Kensington Palace said in the statement.It added: “The Prince and Princess wish to say a…

Daniella Greenbaum Davis, a television producer and a former editor at Commentary, the neoconservative, pro-Israel magazine, said that she “grew up in a Holocaust home” — one of her grandmothers is a survivor — in which her family often averred that the “best revenge” against antisemitism was to “be Jewish, proud, and repopulate.” Ms. Davis, who is modern Orthodox, said that the events of Oct. 7 had strengthened her conviction to have another child soon. (She already has two.)Young lives have taken on a terrible significance in the war between Israel and Hamas, where each side has stressed the brutality…

John Pilger, a muckraking foreign correspondent and documentarian who trained his often righteous anger on injustices around the globe, like the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia and human rights abuses in East Timor, died on Dec. 30 in London. He was 84.His son, Sam, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pulmonary fibrosis.A tireless critic of Western imperialism and a voice for the voiceless, Mr. Pilger was comfortable with his role as a journalistic provocateur. He once derided impartiality as “a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority.”But he was sometimes criticized for shaping his reporting to…

David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not…

President Biden sent a letter to four senior members of Congress on Wednesday urging them to quickly approve a $20 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, following the vote one day earlier by Turkey’s Parliament to allow Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to three U.S. officials.The White House sent the letter to the top Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which have oversight of arms transfers by the State Department to other nations. As of Wednesday night, the four senior lawmakers had not given…

Soldiers who seized power in three West African nations announced on Sunday that they would pull their countries out of their regional economic bloc.Military juntas in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso said they were withdrawing from the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, because of sanctions the group imposed in response to the coups that were carried out.In recent years, a string of coups have erupted across the Sahel, the arid strip south of the Sahara, forming an unbroken strip of military-run countries stretching coast to coast across the continent.While attempts by the regional bloc to reverse some…

I recently started losing weight, and am having trouble figuring out what to wear. It seems foolish to invest in clothes before I finally stabilize again, but wearing things that are too big not only doesn’t look good, but is not good psychologically. Any suggestions? — Paula, MilwaukeeChanges in your body, whether intentional or not, are intrinsically connected to changes in your emotions and sense of self, even before you start taking into account social messaging around weight and physical beauty.Altering your shape can alter your identity in pretty essential ways, and since identity is expressed in part through clothing,…