Author: NY TIMES

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…

The end of the National Football League’s regular season on Sunday triggered the start of two annual events: the playoffs, and the period when a wave of teams fire head coaches and general managers and start frenzied searches for their replacements.The league has little control over the outcomes of the games. But over the past 20 years, the N.F.L. has tried, and often failed, to change the composition of the highest ranks in football-related jobs at every club.For a league in which roughly 70 percent of N.F.L. players are people of color, it has been a source of embarrassment that…

A U.S. congressional committee has asked the Commerce Department to look into whether a giant technology company controlled by the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates should be put under trade restrictions because of its ties to China.The company, G42, specializes in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, and is overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the national security adviser of the Emirates and a younger brother of the country’s ruler.It has signed recent agreements with prominent American technology companies, including Microsoft, Dell and OpenAI. A Silicon Valley chip firm, Cerebras, is building a supercomputer for G42 to create…

In early 2020, the Food and Drug Administration responded to decades of escalating concerns about a commonly prescribed drug for asthma and allergies by deploying one of its most potent tools: a stark warning on the drug’s label that it could cause aggression, agitation and even suicidal thoughts.The agency’s label, which was primarily aimed at doctors, was supposed to sound an alert about the 25-year-old medication, Singulair, also known by its generic name, montelukast. But it barely dented use: The drug was still prescribed to 12 million people in the United States in 2022.Children face the greatest risks of the…