Author: NY TIMES

The State Department notified Congress on Friday that it had approved a $23 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets and related equipment to Turkey after the country’s leader signed documents to allow Sweden’s long-delayed entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, department officials and the Pentagon said.Although Congress could move to formally block the sale, four senior lawmakers told the State Department on Friday evening that they would not object, after their aides reviewed the documents signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, U.S. officials said.Congressional officials had demanded to see the documents before signaling their approval of the…

Two masked attackers shot and killed one person during a church service on Sunday in Istanbul, Turkish officials said. The motive was not immediately clear.The attack took place around 11:40 a.m. at the Santa Maria church, an Italian Catholic church in the Sariyer district of Istanbul, the interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, wrote on the social media platform X. Mr. Yerlikaya gave only the victim’s initials, C.T., and said that an investigation into the shooting was underway and that the authorities were looking for the assailants.“Such provocations will never be allowed in our country,” Akif Cagatay Kilic, a top adviser to…

Zheng Qinwen reached the Grand Slam final for the first time. In fact, she is the first Chinese to do so in ten years.Zheng Shuang, who grew up watching Li Na, the last Chinese Grand Slam champion, said she had watched the 2014 Australian Open final “at least 10 times.” If you regularly browse tennis social media, you will no doubt have seen the image of Zheng Shuang watching Li Na win 10 years ago, shocked by her achievement. Tennis in China is expected to flourish as a result. This is Zheng Qinwen watching Li Na win the 2014 Australian…

Couture week is by no means an outlier on the fashion calendar. It is, after all, where designers are expected to flex a bit of imaginative muscle, dare to be creative outside the margins and show what artistry looks like at the height of this medium.Does that make it a bit of a deviation? Perhaps.But this season, the shows seemed to really find their stride with a dialogue that was consistent between the runway and the streets. Street style was especially inspiring with an elegance that departed from the more subdued looks we saw last summer. The inspiration was particularly…

Mr. Jefferies said the railroads had taken several steps after the East Palestine accident to improve safety. Previously, the industry required that railroads stop and remove a rail car if a wheel bearing’s temperature hit 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In July, the association required that action at 170 degrees. (The wheel bearing on the East Palestine train at one point reached 253 degrees, according to a track-side detector.)Union Pacific, the largest railroad in the United States as determined by miles of track, reported a 32 percent increase in accidents in the period. Kristen South, a company spokeswoman, said that some accidents,…

Cruise, the driverless car subsidiary of General Motors, said in a report on Thursday that an adversarial approach taken by its top executives toward regulators had led to a cascade of events that ended with a nationwide suspension of Cruise’s fleet and investigations by California and federal authorities, including the Justice Department.The roughly 100-page report was compiled by a law firm that Cruise and G.M. hired to look into whether Cruise’s executives had misled California regulators about an October crash in San Francisco in which one of its vehicles dragged a woman 20 feet. The review found that while the…

Sam and Olga had concluded that only involuntary treatment could break the cycle for Andrey — something open-ended, combining long-term injectable medications with intensive therapy and counseling.They are part of a much larger ideological shift taking place, as communities grope for ways to manage ballooning homeless populations. California, one of the first states to turn away from involuntary treatment, has passed new laws expanding it. New York has made a billion-dollar investment in residential housing, psychiatric beds and wraparound services.Sam had staked his hopes on Washington’s new involuntary treatment law, and found it maddening that this fall, when Andrey was…

Melanie Anne Safka was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in Astoria, Queens, to Frederick and Pauline (Altomare) Safka. Her mother was a jazz singer, and Melanie turned to music at an early age, making her public singing appearance on the talent show “Live Like a Millionaire” at 4.By the time she was in high school in Long Branch, N.J., she was already singing in local coffee houses, and eventually moved her act to the folk dens of New York while studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.She earned a contract with Columbia Records and released two singles on…

Israeli military and intelligence officials have concluded that a significant number of weapons used by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks and in the war in Gaza came from an unlikely source: the Israeli military itself.For years, analysts have pointed to underground smuggling routes to explain how Hamas stayed so heavily armed despite an Israeli military blockade of the Gaza Strip. But recent intelligence has shown the extent to which Hamas has been able to build many of its rockets and anti-tank weaponry out of the thousands of munitions that failed to detonate when Israel lobbed them into Gaza, according…

Gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods in Haiti’s capital, and killings have more than doubled in the past year, but for the organizers of the Port-au-Prince Jazz Festival, the show simply had to go on.So while judges an ocean away deliberated whether to send a contingent of officers to pacify Haiti’s violence-riddled streets, festival organizers made do by shortening the length of the event to four days from eight, moving the acts from a public stage to a restricted hotel venue and replacing the handful of artists who canceled.As 11.5 million Haitians struggle to feed their families and ride the…