Author: NY TIMES

Pope Francis on Monday called surrogate motherhood a “despicable” practice that should be universally banned for its “commercialization” of pregnancy, including the practice among wars, terrorism and other threats to peace and humanity in an annual speech to ambassadors.An unborn child must not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” Francis said, adding. “I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.” A child, he said, should never be “the basis of a commercial contract,”…

This year’s revamped Golden Globe Awards brought several changes to the program. But it was business as usual on the red carpet, with hundreds of celebrities seemingly relishing the chance to give us something to ogle after last year’s strikes stopped many from posing for cameras at award shows and events.There were ball gowns. There were sequins. There was lots of red — crimson dresses, candy apple heels, oxblood tuxedos — with dashes of “Barbie” pink and the color purple.Aside from maybe Jason Sudeikis, who wore a crewneck sweater that Styles reporter Jessica Testa said induced “flashbacks to him wearing…

The Alaska Airlines plane that lost a piece of its fuselage in midair on Friday was not being used in long flights over water because a pressurization warning light had gone off during three recent flights, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday.Jennifer Homendy, the board’s chairwoman, said it was too soon to say whether the issue had played a role in the Friday incident, which led to the grounding of 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes in the United States. “It is certainly a concern and it’s one that we want to dig into,” Ms. Homendy said at…

At an event in San Francisco in November, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, was asked what surprises the field would bring in 2024.Online chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will take “a leap forward that no one expected,” Mr. Altman immediately responded.Sitting beside him, James Manyika, a Google executive, nodded and said, “Plus one to that.”The A.I. industry this year is set to be defined by one main characteristic: a remarkably rapid improvement of the technology as advancements build upon one another, enabling A.I. to generate new kinds of media, mimic human reasoning in new ways…

People taking the wildly popular drugs Ozempic, to treat diabetes, and Wegovy, to combat obesity, are slightly less likely to have suicidal thoughts than people who are not taking them, researchers reported on Friday.Millions of people take Ozempic and Wegovy, which are considered to be among the biggest blockbusters in medical history. But last year a European drug safety agency said it was investigating whether the drugs cause suicidal thoughts. The new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, was funded by the National Institutes of Health and used a huge population. The findings provide data that may potentially reassure…

In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing…

JERUSALEM — As the war in the Gaza Strip ended its third month on Sunday, with top diplomats touring the region to try to stop the conflict from spreading, Israel said it had broken up Hamas’s command structure in northern Gaza and signaled that it would not change its objective of dismantling the group’s capabilities across the ravaged territory.“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all of its goals — eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of…

Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, held meetings on Sunday with leaders in Jordan and Qatar as part of a weeklong eastern Mediterranean and Middle East tour aimed at reducing the risk that the war in Gaza could spread in the region.Mr. Blinken met separately in Amman with King Abdullah II and Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister. He thanked the king for Jordan’s role in sending humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the two agreed to keep coordinating on aid, according to a statement by a State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller.The U.S. has been pressing Israel for months to…

The ReckoningIf Ms. Bodnar is cagey about specifics, it’s because she has faced controversy. There’s the plaintiff who sued Thrive in 2018, alleging that the company was not donating to charities in the way that it claimed. (The lawsuit resulted in a “stipulated” dismissal; Ms. Bodnar signed a non-disparagement agreement that precludes her from talking about it.) There are the trolls who harassed her on social media when Forbes added her, in 2019, to its “richest women” list.“It was actually quite scary when that list came out,” said Ms. Bodnar, who splits her time between Seattle and Los Angeles, where…

A harrowing flight over the weekend is again forcing Boeing to confront concerns over its planes, particularly the 737 Max, already one of the most scrutinized jets in history.No one was seriously injured in the episode on an Alaska Airlines flight Friday night in which a portion of a 737 Max 9 fuselage blew out in midair, exposing passengers to howling wind. The plane landed safely, but the event, on a flight from Portland, Ore., to Ontario, Calif., has spooked travelers and prompted immediate safety inspections on similar planes.Federal authorities focused attention on a mid-cabin door plug, which is used…