Author: NY TIMES

Four mothers sat quietly in the nursing room around midnight, breastfeeding their newborn babies. As one mother nodded off, her eyelids heavy after giving birth less than two weeks earlier, a nurse came in and whisked her baby away. The exhausted new mom returned to her private room to sleep.Sleep is just one of the luxuries provided by South Korea’s postpartum care centers.The country may have the world’s lowest birthrate, but it is also home to perhaps some of its best postpartum care. At centers like St. Park, a small, boutique postpartum center, or joriwon, in Seoul, new moms are…

In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by…

Dear listeners,Since we started The Amplifier — gasp — almost a year ago now, there is one question I’ve been asked over and over (and over): “When are you going to start putting your playlists on Apple Music?” If you are one of those many people who inquired, I have great news: That day has finally arrived.Starting with today’s Amplifier, we’ll be including links to stream our playlists with either Spotify or Apple Music, in addition to YouTube links to individual songs. And while I’m at it, I’ll respond to a few of our other most frequently asked questions to…

The United Nations’ highest court said on Friday that Israel must take action to prevent acts of genocide by its forces in the Gaza Strip, adding to the international pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reduce death and destruction in the battered Palestinian enclave.But the court did not rule on whether Israel was committing genocide, and it did not call on Israel to stop its military campaign to crush Hamas, as South Africa, which brought the case, had requested.While the ruling had elements that each side could embrace, the court allowed the case charging Israel with genocide to proceed,…

Being early, Marc Andreessen once ruefully said, is the same as being wrong. Admittedly, Andreesen, the software engineer, angel investor and all-purpose Silicon Valley maven, deployed the maxim in the context of his own somewhat bitter experiences in the world of cloud computing, but it works surprisingly well as an analysis of “Being: Liverpool.”If the title is unfamiliar, that would be no real surprise. The show, depicting Liverpool’s preparations for the 2012-2013 Premier League season, ran for only one series, amounting to just six episodes. Its subsequent cultural half life has been limited, too; those few elements which have lingered…

PHILADELPHIA — A few weeks ago, Joel Embiid said he wondered if Victor Wembunyama knew what he wanted.”I think, first of all, he has to figure out where he wants to play, whether he wants to be a guard or a big man or something else,” the 76ers big man said. “It’s not necessarily whether he wants to be a guard or a big man; it’s that he wants to be a guard. That’s who he wants to be. Do you want to be KD, or do you want to be me? Not Durant, or a version of those guys…

When you have no job, and too much time on your hands, the little things begin to grate. Source link

When Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, hired Kevin Merida to be the newspaper’s top editor nearly three years ago, he hailed the journalist as someone who would maintain the publication’s high standards and journalistic integrity.By this winter, the professional warmth between the two men had chilled. Their relationship was strained in part by an incident in December when Dr. Soon-Shiong tried to dissuade Mr. Merida from pursuing a story about a wealthy California doctor and his dog, three people with knowledge of the interactions said. The doctor was an acquaintance of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s, the…

For more than a decade, the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry envisioned digital coins as an alternate branch of finance, a renegade sector that would operate outside the reach of big banks and government regulators.But as digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ether became more mainstream, the crypto industry collided with a 1946 Supreme Court decision that created what is known as the Howey Test, a legal analysis that determines when a financial product becomes subject to the same strict rules as stocks and bonds.In recent years, regulators have seized on that legal precedent to argue that cryptocurrencies are just another…

Bill Hayes, an actor and singer whose 2,141 episodes of “Days of Our Lives” over five and a half decades constituted the daytime drama version of an ultramarathon, and whose top-selling 1955 single, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” remains seared into the memories of the baby boom generation, died on Jan. 12 at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 98.His wife and longtime co-star, Susan Seaforth Hayes, confirmed his death.To soap opera fans, Mr. Hayes was a staple of weekday afternoons from the days of rabbit-ear antennas into the streaming era.He began his tenure on the long-running NBC…