Author: NY TIMES

TikTok has quietly restricted one of its few tools to help measure the popularity of trends on the video app, after the tool’s results were used by researchers and lawmakers to scrutinize content on the site related to geopolitics and the Israel-Hamas war.The tool, called the Creative Center, is meant to help advertisers track popular hashtags on the site. The Creative Center is available to anyone and can produce figures about the number of videos tied to a certain hashtag and information about the audience that saw those videos.The company’s critics had harnessed the tool to argue that TikTok, which…

June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke barriers as a Black woman by heading New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services under three mayors, died on Sunday in the Bronx. She was 99.Her daughter, Rachel Christmas Derrick, said she died in a hospital of heart failure.As a city commissioner, as chief of rehabilitation services at Harlem Hospital Center, and in her role overseeing the transition of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare to a Democratic administration for President-elect Jimmy Carter, Dr. Christmas ardently advanced her professional agenda.Her priorities included improving mental health services for older…

Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive leap in the 1980s into signing college athletes to secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal problems, died on Dec. 10 in Burbank, Calif. He was 91.His son Gary confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.Mr. Walters found his footing in show business through his ownership of restaurants, pizzerias, mambo joints and nightclubs, including the Norby Walters Supper Club on the East Side of Manhattan, near the Copacabana, which he opened in 1966.He walked away from the club…

Israel said its military is starting to shift from a large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip to a more targeted phase in its war against Hamas, and Israeli officials have privately told their American counterparts that they hoped the transition would be completed by the end of January, U.S. officials said. Israel’s disclosure came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was expected in Israel to press officials there to curtail their campaign in Gaza and to prevent the war from spreading across the region, particularly in the aftermath of an Israeli strike last week that killed…

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…