Author: NY TIMES

Russia launched a large-scale air attack against Ukraine on Monday, Ukrainian and Russian officials said, pounding several regions with missiles that killed at least four people, wounded more than 30 others and heavily damaged residential buildings and industrial sites.Air raid alerts blared across the country from about 6 a.m. after the Ukrainian Air Force reported the takeoff of nearly 20 Russian fighter jets that it said fired more than 50 cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The tactics appeared to be in keeping with Moscow’s strategy of overwhelming Ukrainian air defenses with waves of different types of aerial weapons.Gen. Valery Zaluzhny,…

On the morning of New Year’s Day, along the sleepy streets of the East Village in Manhattan, scarf-bundled crowds trickled into St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery to attend a 12-hour poetry reading that has been a spiritually cleansing downtown tradition since the 1970s. To its devotees, the gathering’s hypnotically lengthy programming of readings and avant-garde performances provides a dependably radical initiation into the new year.Hosted by the Poetry Project, the nonprofit organization that has operated out of the historic church since the 1960s, the marathon serves as its biggest annual fund-raiser. About 150 writers, artists and dancers take their turns onstage…

Read more about the first Vulcan launch and the Astrobotic moon mission here.A brand-new American rocket lifted off from a launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Monday, and for the first time in more than 50 years, an American spacecraft will be headed toward the surface of the moon. The rocket is called Vulcan, and it was built by the company United Launch Alliance. Here’s what you need to know about its first flight.The rocket completed the initial stages of its flight.Vulcan launched on schedule at 2:18 a.m. Eastern on Monday. Coverage continues to be broadcast on NASA Television.The rocket…

OpenAI said on Monday that a New York Times lawsuit against it was “without merit” and that it supported and created opportunities for news organizations, as it waded further into a debate over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing the companies of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the ChatGPT chatbot. Chatbots now compete with The Times as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.In a 1,000-word blog post on Monday, OpenAI said it collaborated with…

Klee Benally, a dynamic Navajo activist, artist and punk-rock musician who championed Native American and environmental causes, died on Dec. 30 in Phoenix. He was 48.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Jeneda Benally. She did not specify the cause.For decades, Mr. Benally, who lived in Flagstaff, Ariz., fought the expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort on one of the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range just north of Flagstaff that 13 tribes consider sacred. He also fought the resort’s use of treated wastewater to make snow, a practice that Native Americans and environmental groups said…

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…

Israel said it was shifting its war in GazaIsrael has begun a new and less intense phase of its invasion of Gaza, its military said, after weeks of pressure to scale back its offensive. But its chief of staff said that the country was ready for “another war” against Hezbollah, which said a commander was killed in a strike in Lebanon.The Israeli military’s top spokesman said the new phase would involve fewer airstrikes and ground troops in Gaza after a drawdown began this month. He said Israel would now focus on Hamas’s southern and central strongholds.“We can expect more targeted…

Call it an embarrassment of riches: The musician Alicia Keys and her husband Kasseem Dean, the producer and D.J. known professionally as Swizz Beatz, have purchased such massive artworks that only a few could squeeze inside their homes in California, New York and New Jersey. Some colossal paintings by artists like Kehinde Wiley, Derrick Adams and Titus Kaphar eventually got through the door and became staples of the couple’s daily routine — backdrops to movie nights and family parties.“We have never seen all these artworks in one room,” Keys said in a recent interview. That will change on Feb. 10…

An emergency landing on Friday of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet in Portland, Ore., led the Federal Aviation Administration to order some U.S. airlines to stop using some Max 9 planes until they are inspected. The order affects about 171 planes owned by Alaska, United and other airlines. The episode also raised troubling new questions about the safety of a workhorse aircraft design dogged by years of problems and multiple deadly crashes.No one was seriously injured in Friday’s incident. The jetliner returned to the airport in Portland shortly after a chunk of the body of the plane…

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