Author: NY TIMES

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops fighting in the Gaza Strip on Monday, vowing to stay the course of the war even with the death toll mounting. His trip came hours after Gazan health officials reported that a devastating overnight strike on a crowded neighborhood had killed dozens.It was the Israeli leader’s second known visit to Gaza since the war began. Mr. Netanyahu has been facing increasing pressure from the United States to lower the intensity of the war, but he said on Monday that Israel would “deepen” the fighting in coming days.The strike late Sunday in central Gaza…

Dear Santa, I’ve been so very good this year. Could you please bring me a miniature cow? I promise I’ll take excellent care of it. Please, please, pleaaaaaase!While it might sound ridiculous, miniature cows have become a much-requested holiday gift in recent years.“Just had one picked up this morning,” Allie Sine, a rancher in Wright City, Mo., said Thursday.The animal, a brown micro heifer, cost $10,000 and was headed elsewhere in Missouri to be a surprise Christmas present for a 3-year-old girl. It was one of more than 15 miniature cows that Ms. Sine, 27, said she had sold this…

And in November, the financial services industry established a system that automatically moves old retirement accounts into the plan of the worker’s new employer. The Portability Services Network automatically matches Social Security numbers on workplace accounts, obtains the worker’s consent to move the money and automatically deposits money from the old account into the new employer’s plan. Employees can check for missing accounts on the network’s website by using their last name and last four digits of their Social Security number.The voluntary network includes the plan administrators Alight Solutions, Empower, Fidelity Investments, Principal, TIAA and Vanguard and uses technology from…

Bernhard has clocked a lot of cutting-edge moments: A generation before Ali Wong earned acclaim for doing raunchy comedy while pregnant, Bernhard was blazing the theater world, including on Broadway with her solo show “I’m Still Here … Damn It!” — foul-mouthed with a sheer dress and a baby bump, that she pointedly never addressed.“First of all, being pregnant is so, sort of, pedestrian,” she said. “There’s a billion people having babies all the time, so why talk about it? It wasn’t my jam. And I loved it. I had so much fun being pregnant, being onstage, performing, and not…

Gadi Haggai, a 73-year-old man taken hostage in the Hamas-led invasion of Israel, is now believed to have died in the Oct. 7 attack, the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum said in a statement on Friday.It said his body was still being held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.The forum said Mr. Haggai and his wife, Judih Weinstein Haggai, citizens of both Israel and the United States, were shot during the Hamas terror attack while they were on their regular morning walk in the fields and vineyards of Kibbutz Nir Oz.Ms. Haggai contacted friends to tell them they had…

The Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny has been moved to a remote Arctic prison and “is doing well,” his spokeswoman said on Monday, ending a 20-day mystery over his whereabouts that had many supporters fearing the worst.“We have found Aleksei,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. “His lawyer saw him today.”Ms. Yarmysh’s announcement ended a frantic search through Russia’s vast prison system for Mr. Navalny, who disappeared on Dec. 5. Mr. Navalny’s exiled allies said that they had found him in the remote penal colony in the Arctic after sending more than 600 requests to prisons and…

When Maxwell Storey Dubler and Carl Theophilus Cade caught each other’s eye at a Los Angeles bar, both were looking for lasting love but neither expected to find it with each other. On paper, at least, they looked like opposites.It was March 2015 and Mr. Dubler was then a professional downhill skateboarder and photographer. Mr. Cade was deep into his career as a real estate developer.The two talked for quite a while before Mr. Dubler offered Mr. Cade a ride home. But as the men prepared to leave the bar, the D.J. started spinning “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”…

Wall Street strategists are issuing forecasts for the performance of the stock market in 2024.Pay them no mind.The predictions are usually wrong, and when they’re right it’s only by accident.Consider their prophecies for 2023. At the end of 2022, strategists predicted that the S&P 500 would end 2023 at 4,078, a gain of 6.2 percent from where it started, according to data from Bloomberg.At the moment, the market is above 4,700, a gain of more than 22 percent. These forecasts were so deeply off the mark undoubtedly because 2022 was a truly terrible year for stocks — and also one…

A well-timed holiday remix that doubles as shameless Oscar campaigning? Yes, they Ken! Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson’s “Barbie” showstopper “I’m Just Ken” is reimagined in three different formats — acoustic lament, club banger and Christmas novelty — on the newly released “I’m Just Ken” EP. “I’m Just Ken (Merry Kristmas Barbie)” reworks the arrangement into a stately, vaguely festive bit of chamber-pop; Gosling doesn’t fill the lyrics with Christmas puns, thankfully, but merely mutters in conclusion a wistful, “Merry Christmas, Barbie … wherever you are.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ“We put the trap in entrapreneur,” the British drill rapper Central Cee spits…

Mr. Guterres said he hoped that the resolution would help the U.N. and aid agencies deliver more food, water and medicine to people in Gaza, but said that the only way to truly address the crisis was to end the fighting.“A humanitarian cease-fire is the only way to begin to meet the desperate needs of people in Gaza and end their ongoing nightmare,” he told reporters after the vote.The Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, thanked President Biden and other U.S. officials for “standing on Israel’s side” throughout the negotiations and “maintaining defined red lines.”“The resolution maintains Israel’s security…