Author: NY TIMES

President Biden and his top national security aides believed last summer that the chances of conflict with Iran and its proxies were well contained.After secret talks, they had just concluded a deal that led to the release of five imprisoned Americans in return for $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds and some Iranian prisoners. The militants that Tehran finances and arms — Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — seemed relatively quiet. Iran even slowed enrichment of uranium at its underground nuclear sites, delaying its progress toward a weapon.Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of…

The story of the Forest of Immortal Stories begins not so long ago, in 2019, when Elena-Mirela Cojocaru, beloved wife of Ion Cojocaru, mayor of the hamlet of Nucsoara, died after a struggle with cancer. Mr. Cojocaru himself soon fell ill with a heart ailment; as a remedy his doctor told him to walk in the countryside, 6,000 or more steps a day.Nucsoara and its 1,222 inhabitants reside on the forested slopes of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. The Carpathians are a land of fog, fictional vampires and real-life wolves, as well as several thousand brown bears and roughly two-thirds…

Authors: Lauren Merola, Max Olson, Austin Meeker, Jim Trotter, and Nicole AuerbachIt’s been 26 years, but ultimately no one is better off than Michigan.The Wolverines enter Championship City ranked second in passing yards allowed per game with 150.0, but they face their toughest task yet in taming Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. ) flamethrower. Michigan answered the bell, holding Penix to 255 yards and a touchdown – the only Washington touchdown of the night – and intercepted 27 of 51 passes, matching the national leader’s passing average. There’s a huge difference between usual performance in yards (332.0) and passing yards…

Both say it was as much the differences in their cultures that intrigued the other, at first, as it was their personalities. “Shosh is a very sweet, but straightforward person,” Mr. Boga said, while Ms. Heerter said, “Rahul is so kind and that really drew me to him.”Mr. Boga is from Hyderabad, India, and works as a senior product manager for the Boston office of a consulting firm. He has a degree in information systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Hyderabad, and an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.Ms. Heerter has a bachelor’s of science in…

The Golden Globes averaged 9.4 million viewers on Sunday night, according to Nielsen, an increase over the 2023 ceremony ratings but still significantly lower than the audience totals of just a few years ago.Until 2020, the Globes regularly drew 17 million to 20 million viewers. In 2019, the Globes was narrowing the viewership gap with the Oscars so significantly that it appeared the telecast could become the most-watched awards show.And then disaster struck.First came the pandemic, which deprived the 2021 Globes of its usual booze-soaked freewheeling ceremony, sending the ratings tumbling. Then came a scandal for the organization that administers…

In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were…

For four days, Kareem Sabawi’s body lay wrapped in a blanket in a cold, empty apartment as his family sheltered nearby. He was killed during intense Israeli bombardment near his family home, his father and mother said, and in the days that followed, it was too dangerous to step outside and lay their 10-year-old child to rest.His family called the Palestine Red Crescent for help. But it was the early days of Israel’s ground invasion in northern Gaza, and forces were blocking streets with tanks and gunfire, preventing rescue workers from reaching those killed by Israeli airstrikes. Each day, the…

Russia launched a large-scale air attack against Ukraine on Monday, Ukrainian and Russian officials said, pounding several regions with missiles that killed at least four people, wounded more than 30 others and heavily damaged residential buildings and industrial sites.Air raid alerts blared across the country from about 6 a.m. after the Ukrainian Air Force reported the takeoff of nearly 20 Russian fighter jets that it said fired more than 50 cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The tactics appeared to be in keeping with Moscow’s strategy of overwhelming Ukrainian air defenses with waves of different types of aerial weapons.Gen. Valery Zaluzhny,…

On the morning of New Year’s Day, along the sleepy streets of the East Village in Manhattan, scarf-bundled crowds trickled into St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery to attend a 12-hour poetry reading that has been a spiritually cleansing downtown tradition since the 1970s. To its devotees, the gathering’s hypnotically lengthy programming of readings and avant-garde performances provides a dependably radical initiation into the new year.Hosted by the Poetry Project, the nonprofit organization that has operated out of the historic church since the 1960s, the marathon serves as its biggest annual fund-raiser. About 150 writers, artists and dancers take their turns onstage…

Read more about the first Vulcan launch and the Astrobotic moon mission here.A brand-new American rocket lifted off from a launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Monday, and for the first time in more than 50 years, an American spacecraft will be headed toward the surface of the moon. The rocket is called Vulcan, and it was built by the company United Launch Alliance. Here’s what you need to know about its first flight.The rocket completed the initial stages of its flight.Vulcan launched on schedule at 2:18 a.m. Eastern on Monday. Coverage continues to be broadcast on NASA Television.The rocket…