Author: NY TIMES

The NFL has eliminated its final four teams, and the San Francisco 49ers (+145) remain the favorite to win Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas.After narrowly defeating the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round, the 49ers will host the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship Game next week. The 49ers had a touchdown advantage.Baltimore has the second-highest odds after beating Houston 34-10 in the divisional round. Lamar Jackson deserves to win the MVP trophy this season, and he proved why with his dominant second half as the Ravens outscored the Texans 24-0 after halftime. Baltimore is expected to get…

Ariane and Andrew Vincent’s former home in Melbourne, Australia, was the kind of place people dream about: a three-story house near the beach with views of Port Phillip Bay.But after years of climbing all those stairs — and chasing three growing children (now 18 to 23) among floors — “we were ready to live on one level,” said Ms. Vincent, 55, a business consultant who has worked in the furniture industry. “We wanted a pool and more of a family home that was more fun.”Six years ago, they found something in Brighton, a nearby suburb, that captured their hearts: an…

Tensions within CNN over coverage of former President Donald J. Trump burst into the open on Thursday during an internal call with the network’s journalists, as an executive candidly questioned the approach of the channel’s new chief executive, Mark Thompson.CNN aired roughly 10 minutes of Mr. Trump’s victory speech after he won the Iowa caucuses on Monday before cutting away. The decision to cut him off prompted derision from the former president and his allies, although critics on the left questioned why CNN had taken Mr. Trump live in the first place, given his tendency to spread falsehoods and conspiracies.…

Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office.The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” were manipulated to seem as if they had been sent by an officer of a Democratic committee, the office said.The attorney general’s office stressed that voting in the primary would not rule out voters from also casting ballots in the general election in November.“These messages…

When Augustin Lignier, a professional photographer in Paris, was in graduate school, he began to ponder the point of picture-taking in the modern world: Why did so many of us feel compelled to photograph our lives and share those images online?It was not a novel question, but it led Mr. Lignier to a surprising place, and before long he found himself building what was, in essence, a photo booth for rats.He took inspiration from B.F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist who had devised a test chamber to study learning in rats. The Skinner box, as it became known, dispensed food pellets…

Felicities abounded in the programming. The first concert paired Ernst Krenek’s “Little Symphony,” a Neo-Classical mishmash of Mozart and jazz, with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, whose score Krenek completed at the request of Mahler’s widow, Alma. The second concert juxtaposed two symphonies that utilize a theme-and-variations form, Prokofiev’s Second and Webern’s Op. 21. Both concerts ended with some drama, with the suite from Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and Prokofiev’s Fifth, which incorporates music from his stage works.The concerts gestured at the historical context on either side of the Weimar era. Prokofiev’s Fifth represented a time when…

Europeans, insisting on Palestinian statehood, are frustrated by Israel’s opposition and lack of a postwar plan for the devastated Gaza Strip. Source link

The United States and Britain carried out large-scale military strikes on Monday against eight sites in Yemen controlled by Houthi militants, according to the two countries. The strikes signaled that the Biden administration intends to wage a sustained and, at least for now, open-ended campaign against the Iran-backed group that has disrupted traffic in vital international sea lanes.The strikes — the eighth in nearly two weeks — hit multiple targets at each site, and were bigger and broader than a recent series of more limited attacks against individual Houthi missiles that the Americans said popped up on short notice. Those…

Every August, after the NBA releases next season’s schedule, Miami Heat chief marketing officer Michael McCullough thinks about the next 82 games. Not only did he think about ticket sales and promotions, he also held meetings with the team’s equipment managers to focus on an important part of his job: the uniforms.Across the NBA, putting together the right uniforms used to be a no-brainer. There are only two options. When Heat equipment manager and travel coordinator Rob Pimental started his career with the Sacramento Kings in the 1980s, the team’s uniforms were only white and blue: white at home, Wear…

Macy’s rejected a $5.8 billion takeover bid late Sunday that valued the struggling department store chain at roughly 20 percent above its closing share price on Friday, but suggested it was “open to opportunities.”The bidders, Arkhouse Management and Brigade Capital, are seeking to acquire Macy’s stock that they do not already own at $21 a share and have threatened to take the offer to shareholders.With a potential hostile bid looming, questions are rising over how Arkhouse and Brigade could pull off a deal and whether additional suitors could appear, potentially setting off a bidding war.In a statement released Sunday night,…