Author: NY TIMES

Edward Jay Epstein, an iconoclastic author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom about controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, has died in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Covid, his nephew Richard Nessel said. He said Mr. Epstein was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday. A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of government conspiracies and corporate dereliction. Some raised more questions than they answered.In an improbable start to a…

Kelsey Masako Fumiko Kiyota and Elliott Lin met through a mutual friend in 2012, but it wasn’t until six years into their friendship that they realized they had something important in common — a love for the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise. The discovery happened in January 2018 while at a party at their friend’s house in San Francisco, where they both lived.“I loved the story being about friends and family,” said Ms. Kiyota, 38. “Elliott had such a different take on it. He was like ‘I just love the cars’,” she said with a laugh.“I’d never met anyone, especially…

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday that it was expanding its scrutiny of Boeing, increasing oversight of the company with an audit of production of the 737 Max 9, a week after a panel in the body of one of those planes was blown out during flight.Later Friday night, the F.A.A. said it was mandating an initial round of inspections of the panel — a plug where an exit door would go in a different configuration — on 40 Max 9 planes before it would approve Boeing’s proposed inspection and maintenance instructions for all grounded Max 9s. The agency…

El gusto de Taylor Swift por Le Creuset es real: su colección de utensilios de cocina ha aparecido en una cuenta de Tumblr dedicada a la decoración del hogar de la estrella del pop, se evidencia en los regalos de boda que le dio a una seguidora y en un documental de Netflix que fue destacado en la página de Facebook de Le Creuset.Lo que no es real es el supuesto patrocinio de Swift hacia los productos de la empresa, que en las últimas semanas han aparecido en anuncios publicados en Facebook y otros medios en los que sale su…

The young father headed across the parking lot to join the other parents meeting their children’s new preschool teachers. After a few steps, he began sweating and twitching. As the sky reeled, he staggered back to the car, desperate to lie down in the back seat and breathe, hidden by tinted windows.“Did you take something?” his wife, Anne, shouted at him while dialing 911. Eric, 26, had completed rehab earlier in the summer.“The shot! The shot!” he groaned, just before he hit the ground and blacked out.In the emergency room of a nearby hospital in southern New Jersey, doctors tried…

Ariana Grande returns with a thumping, crimson-lipped kiss-off on “Yes, And?,” a feather-light confection safely — but still enjoyably — in her comfort zone. Grande has been filming the movie version of the smash musical “Wicked” since her 2020 album “Positions,” so this comeback single lets her have some fun with the house-music revival (à la Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul”) that has become popular in her absence. The most obvious sonic reference that Grande and her fellow writers and producers Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh are conjuring here is Madonna’s “Vogue,” and though the song does its best to seem…

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…