Author: NY TIMES

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was meeting with top Israeli officials on Tuesday, continuing diplomatic efforts to avert a broader war in the region.A day earlier, a spokesman for Israel’s military said that it was shifting to a new phase of combat involving fewer troops and airstrikes.Mr. Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv on Monday after Israel launched strikes into southern Lebanon killing a senior commander of Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia, further inflaming concerns that others could be drawn into the fighting. The Biden administration has been struggling with deepening disagreements with Israeli counterparts over issues including the risk…

Israel has long seen Hezbollah, with thousands of trained fighters and a deep arsenal of rockets and other weapons, as the most formidable foe on its borders. And Israeli officials say Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, in particular, poses a major threat.A strike on Monday in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s stronghold, killed a Radwan force commander, Wissam Hassan al-Tawil, the latest volley in the back-and-forth attacks across the border that have deepened fears the war between Israel and Hamas could broaden into a regional conflict.The strike has been widely attributed to Israel, which did not confirm or deny responsibility. Israeli officials have…

Consider the plight of January, the sad sack of months.It lacks for sunlight. It has some of the worst weather in the Northern Hemisphere — a dreary cold that happens to stretch on for 31 days.It’s a month without social holidays. Even lowly February, its companion in the winter doldrums, has Valentine’s Day. January suffered another blow in 2022, when its one day of excitement, Super Bowl Sunday, moved permanently to the year’s second month.Hollywood isn’t much help. Rather than providing distractions in these bleak days, the entertainment industry has made January a dumping ground for films that have no…

It started with a postcard-perfect snapshot. An image of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, lounging in a chair on a secluded white-sand beach, provoked heated words from officials in the Maldives, a tiny archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean.Indians on social media reacted with a ferocious wave of indignation, causing ripples all the way to Beijing.Mr. Modi had been posing for a series of pictures to highlight the beachy natural beauty of the islands called Lakshadweep, an Indian territory 150 miles from the mainland and just 100 miles north of the Maldives.Lakshadweep is like a mini Maldives, with barely a…

In December 2020, astronomers documented a burst of highly energetic light in one of the most distant galaxies ever observed. But less than a year later, the paper’s claims lay in limbo. Other scientists said it had merely been a passing satellite.“I was a bit sad that the gamma ray burst turned out to be just an artificial satellite,” said Krzysztof Kamiński, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory Institute in Poland who said he matched the position, time and brightness of the discovery to an orbiting spacecraft.Linhua Jiang, an astronomer at Peking University in Beijing who led the original finding,…

The start of the new year often brings lofty ambitions.It’s 2024 — time to exercise and eat better, says a nagging voice, somewhere deep in your brain. What about learning to knit?It’s enough to make anyone feel anxious.For those who already struggle with anxiety, these heightened expectations can be even more distressing. Especially because research suggests that many of us don’t complete our New Year’s resolutions.So we asked several psychologists for resolutions specifically tailored to people with anxious tendencies. And we broke them down into bite-size steps so you can notch your successes along the way.But don’t feel pressure to…

With the new year, it’s the homestretch for Jaap van Zweden’s six-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which ends this spring.But even on their way out, chief conductors don’t lead their orchestras that much. Before this week, van Zweden hadn’t been on the Philharmonic’s podium since early October, and after Sunday he won’t return until mid-March.So Thursday’s concert at David Geffen Hall was an island in a sea of guest batons. And it was about as van Zweden-esque as a program could be, consisting of nothing but standards: the kind of music that this maestro most…

For a few fleeting moments, the two-story house on the edge of Bureij, a ruined town in central Gaza, still felt like a Palestinian home.Bottles of nail polish, perfume and hair gel stood untouched on a shelf. A collection of fridge magnets decorated the frame of a mirror. Through a window, one could see laundry, hanging from a neighbor’s washing line, swaying in the gentle breeze.But despite the trappings of home, the house now has a new function — as a makeshift Israeli military barracks.Since Israeli ground forces recently fought their way into this part of central Gaza, a unit…

The traditional village ball 18 minutes outside the city ended in the traditional way: young men fighting outside.What made it different were the flashing knives.Three young men were rushed to the hospital early in the morning on Nov. 19. One, the 16-year-old captain of a local rugby team, died en route from a stab wound to his heart.What might have been considered a local tragedy for the residents of Romans-sur-Isère, a working-class city 60 miles south of Lyon, quickly became a national story for one reason: race. The victim was a white teenager from the countryside, while many of the…

Bruce Falck long dreamed of following the example set by his father, who ran a construction company in Johannesburg, South Africa: He wanted to build a house designed specifically for his family.“My dad was a civil engineer, and he built both of the houses I grew up in,” said Mr. Falck, 52, a former Twitter executive now working on a start-up. “I always thought of building a house as something a dad does for his family.”In 2011, he came close. Mr. Falck and his wife, Lauren Weitzman, now 41, who works at Google, bought a house in San Francisco, hiring…