Author: NY TIMES

The C.I.A. is collecting information on senior Hamas leaders and the location of hostages in Gaza, and is providing that intelligence to Israel as it carries out its war in the enclave, according to U.S. officials.A new task force assembled in the days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and some 240 taken hostage back in Gaza, has uncovered information on Hamas’s top leaders, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.Immediately after the Oct. 7 attack, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, sent…

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has tied his country’s great power status to a singular promise: unifying the motherland with Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party sees as sacred, lost territory. A few weeks ago, Mr. Xi called this a “historical inevitability.”But Taiwan’s election on Saturday, handing the presidency to a party that promotes the island’s separate identity for the third time in a row, confirmed that this boisterous democracy has moved even further away from China and its dream of unification.After a campaign of festival-like rallies, where huge crowds shouted, danced and waved matching flags, Taiwan’s voters ignored China’s warnings…

In March 2023, Shelley Smith, an on-air reporter at ESPN for 26 years, received a call from Stephanie Druley, then the network’s head of studios and event production. Smith recalled Drury saying she wanted to talk about something “serious” and needed to stay between the two. She then told Smith that he needed to return the two Sports Emmy statuettes given to her more than a decade ago.Last year, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), which administers the Emmys, revealed a scheme that the network had used to acquire television spots for more than 30 shows. Coveted…

If you can’t have a civil exchange with your ex, Leah Weinberg, a Queens-based lawyer and the author of “The Wedding Roller Coaster,” suggests having a mutual friend or a relative who has a good relationship with both parties handle the logistics of reaching out to vendors and guests. If the couple can’t agree on one person who should do that for them, then each person could appoint a personal “representative,” and those two representatives could then work together, Ms. Weinberg said. And if you have a wedding planner, most will handle vendor outreach if you ask.“It’s helpful to have…

The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party in December.But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms. This might have counted as a pleasant…

Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education.“We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for millions of students, declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”Videos of Mr. Khan’s tutoring bot talk amassed millions of views. Soon, prominent tech executives, including Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief…

The U.S. defense secretary is facing scrutiny after failing to immediately disclose to the White House his recent prostate-cancer diagnosis and a related hospitalization, a breach of protocol for which he has apologized.But while the secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, as a cabinet member, faces certain expectations about what he must disclose publicly regarding his health, and when he should do it, mental health experts who work with patients who have serious illnesses, such as cancer, say that reticence is common — even in the era of oversharing online.“I see it with my patients all the time,” said Dr. Andrew…

Dear listeners,The music video for “Yes, And?,” Ariana Grande’s first new solo single in more than three years, opens with a tight shot of a ruby-red business card bearing the phrase “ag7.” In modern pop parlance, this is a way of hinting that her seventh album is coming soon.I’ve long felt that the seventh album — if an artist is lucky enough to get that far — is a pivotal moment. Sometimes it’s the perfect time for a sonic and aesthetic reinvention, à la U2’s glammy 1991 album (and my favorite in its discography) “Achtung Baby.” It can also be…

The Houthis have long built their legitimacy on hostility toward the United States and Israel, and support for the Palestinian cause. Part of the group’s slogan is “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” Before the strikes on Friday, the group’s leaders had welcomed the prospect of war with the United States.Strikes are therefore “extremely unlikely” to stop the group’s Red Sea attacks, Ms. Porter said.“The Houthis are very comfortable operating in a wartime environment,” she said. “They are more successful as a military group than they are as a government.”The strikes could also help the…

The heirs of a woman who was forced to surrender a painting to the Nazis were dealt a blow on Tuesday in a decades-long legal feud between them and the Spanish museum that now owns the work, when a Federal Court in California ruled that the museum should retain ownership.The ruling, in one of the longest-running Nazi restitution cases, involves a Camille Pissarro painting titled “Rue Saint-Honoré Après-midi, Effet de Pluie” (“Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain”) that is estimated to be worth millions of dollars. The painting was surrendered by a Jewish woman, Lilly Cassirer, to get…