Author: NY TIMES

Jennifer Hermoso, the Spanish soccer star who received an unsolicited kiss on the mouth after her team won the World Cup, gave evidence in Spain’s National Court Tuesday morning against Luis Rubiales, the former Spanish soccer boss who is being investigated over allegations of sexual assault and coercion in connection with the episode.Ms. Hermoso’s testimony concludes the high-profile criminal inquiry of Mr. Rubiales, which was opened days after the World Cup, which took place in Sydney, Australia, in August.A judge, Francisco de Jorge, must now decide whether to charge Mr. Rubiales or to close the case. If Judge de Jorge…

Under the handle Tanner Leatherstein, Volkan Yilmaz rips, burns and slices apart luxury goods to show how much he thinks they are really worth. Source link

The Messenger, a digital news start-up that launched last year with big ambitions, will cut about two dozen employees this week as it faces dwindling cash reserves, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.The employees are expected to be laid off this week as part of a cost-cutting measure, said the person, who would speak only anonymously because the staff had not yet been notified. The company is facing financial headwinds in a tough digital ad market that have put a squeeze on its operations, the person said.In a statement, The Messenger said it was “in the midst…

Several prominent museums have been unable to display their collections online since a cyberattack hit a prominent technological service provider that helps hundreds of cultural organizations show their works digitally and manage internal documents.The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas were among the institutions confirming that their systems have experienced outages in recent days. The service provider, Gallery Systems, said in a recent message to clients, which was obtained by The New York Times, that it had noticed a problem on Dec. 28,…

The rock band Rage Against the Machine is done touring and playing live shows, its drummer said in a social media post on Wednesday.The band previously canceled the remaining performances of a reunion tour of Europe and North America that had been delayed by the pandemic and were planned for 2022 and 2023. They will not be rescheduled.“While there has been some communication that this may be happening in the future,” the drummer, Brad Wilk, wrote in an Instagram post, “I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing live…

Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday delayed the enactment of a new law that makes it harder to remove a prime minister from office — the court’s second ruling in three days that impeded attempts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to gain more power.The new measure says that a sitting prime minister can be judged unfit for office and removed only by votes of three-quarters of cabinet ministers and two-thirds of the Parliament. Previously, a prime minister could have been ruled unfit for office by the attorney general and the courts.But the Supreme Court, in a 6-to-5 decision, ruled on…

Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change.But a new study using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal…

Court documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein are expected to be released soon with many names that were previously redacted, and prominent figures on the right are holding up the impending disclosures as evidence of wrongdoing by Democrats despite a lack of concrete information about what they will show.Most of the names being made public — currently cited in the documents as John Does — have previously been identified in other court documents or in news reports as having been associated with Mr. Epstein.A longtime friend of powerful people, including politicians, business executives and royalty, Mr. Epstein was…

Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood…

The news that three Israeli hostages were mistakenly shot and killed last month in Gaza by soldiers meant to save them outraged many in Israel, who have since demanded answers about how the army conducts itself on the battlefield and safeguards civilians.The three male hostages, captured by Hamas terrorists near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, were killed in Gaza City on Dec. 15. The men, aged 24, 26, and 28, were unarmed when they were shot. They had removed their shirts to reveal that their bodies were not strapped with explosives, and they were waving a makeshift white flag.A…