Author: NY TIMES

This summer, the U.S. men’s basketball team will take the first step toward its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal at the Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Antwerp, Belgium, from February 8-11. The 12-player roster for the event will be the first in line for Team USA to defend its gold medal in Paris.Based on the 18 players invited to participate in the national team training camp in Brooklyn, New York, from February 2 to 4, the committee faces a very challenging task in selecting the final roster, and the current college students may make The decision becomes more complicated. – Mainly…

Over this past Thanksgiving holiday, Timothy Craig Braun and Peter David Arnold broke the news to their 19-year-old fraternal twin daughters: After 25 years together, they were finally getting married.It was a surprise announcement since the couple, who live in Montclair, N.J., had always told their daughters that they were already married.“I was overcome with emotion and super happy for them,” said Beatrice Braun-Arnold, who is a sophomore at Denison University in Ohio. She said that the family had some open conversations in the following days, leaving them all feeling better. “It was an eventful Thanksgiving, to say the least,”…

After a portion of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner’s fuselage blew out in midair minutes after taking off from Portland, Ore., on Jan. 5, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded about 170 Max 9 planes, causing airlines that rely heavily on the aircraft to cancel thousands of flights and inconveniencing many passengers.On Wednesday, the F.A.A. approved inspection and maintenance procedures for the planes, clearing the way for the grounded Max 9 planes to fly again.Airlines said they planned to resume flying the Max 9s this week. Here’s what passengers should know about the plane and their rights if…

Los Angeles County agreed to pay $5 million to the top executive of an election software company who had been arrested and charged in 2022 with mishandling voter data in a case that prosecutors dropped a few weeks later, the executive’s lawyer said this week.The payment, which settles a lawsuit filed last year, is yet another twist for Eugene Yu, 66, the co-founder of the software company Konnech.Mr. Yu and his company faced a barrage of right-wing conspiracy theories after the 2020 election including that Konnech, which is based in Michigan, had stored election data in China. Mr. Yu repeatedly…

The planned execution of a death row inmate by the state of Alabama on Thursday evening will be carried out by a procedure that has never been used for capital punishment in the United States. The inmate, Kenneth Smith, who was convicted in a 1988 stabbing murder, will be put to death by inhaling nitrogen gas, a method known as nitrogen hypoxia.Supporters of the method say it is fast and painless. But earlier this month, the United Nations Human Rights Office urged Alabama to stop the execution, saying it could amount to torture and be in violation of human rights…

But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s…

American officials said Israel was now proposing a 60-day pause in the fighting in exchange for a phased release of hostages. That proposal, the American officials said, could provide a basis for renewed talks. News of Mr. Burns’s travel was earlier reported by The Washington Post.The Biden administration is anxious to cut a deal that will halt the fighting for longer than the one-week pause that began in November and provide some breathing room to figure out what comes next.The talks were set to begin amid tensions between Israel and Qatar, which this week accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of…

As Norway’s higher education minister, Sandra Borch was responsible for making sure that students played by the rules. When one of those students was acquitted of the offense of plagiarism, Ms. Borch appealed, taking the case to the nation’s Supreme Court.So it shocked the country when, just a few days later, Ms. Borch had to resign after it emerged that parts of her master’s thesis seemed identical to other reports that she had not referenced.“When I wrote my master’s thesis around 10 years ago, I made a big mistake,” Ms. Borch said at a news conference on Friday, when she…

Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after…

If what goes up must come down, then the urgent question on the minds of many in Europe is when will interest rates begin dropping? For months, rates have been set at the highest in the European Central Bank’s history.Investors have been betting that the central bank will cut rates quite soon — possibly in April. Traders figure rates must come down because inflation has slowed notably — it’s been below 3 percent since October — and the region’s economy is weak. By the end of year, the central bank will have cut rates by more than 1 percentage point,…