Author: NY TIMES

Bearing witness, at close range and often at great risk, is the essence of a dispatch, and in 2023, our correspondents filed 80 of them from 37 countries, capturing the human experience from almost every angle: the good, the bad and the wrenching.In a year marked by conflicts, dozens of dispatches came directly from war zones: from a rare trip inside Gaza, where we saw a city utterly disfigured; from a ravaged Israel kibbutz, where more than 60 people were murdered on Oct. 7; and from the West Bank, where “there’s no such thing as sleeping at night.”And we got…

Israeli forces clashed with Hamas militants across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Israeli military said, deepening its engagement in the decimated enclave even as the Palestinian death toll from relentless airstrikes in 12 weeks of war soared higher.The Gaza Health Ministry reported Saturday that 165 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks in the previous 24 hours, adding to the toll of more than 20,000 people killed in Gaza since the war began with the Oct. 7 Hamas-led raids into Israel.The Israeli military said late Friday that it had destroyed a Gaza City apartment of the…

I am 68 and live alone in a nice home in the suburbs. My only child, 40, is happily settled with his fiancée in another city. I always hoped they would come back here to raise a family, and I offered to give them my home if they did. They like the idea and plan to build a new house on the site. Over Christmas, I told them I was excited about their plan and added: “You could build a mother-in-law apartment for me or even a guesthouse.” It’s a large lot. My son burst out laughing and said, “Mom,…

Boeing has urged airlines to inspect all 737 Max airplanes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system after an international airline discovered a bolt with a missing nut while performing routine maintenance, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday.After the international airline, which the agency did not name, noticed the missing nut, Boeing discovered that an undelivered 737 Max also had a nut that was not properly tightened, the F.A.A. said.Boeing said it has delivered more than 1,370 of the aircraft worldwide since 2017 and has urged that all of them be inspected for the possible loose hardware.…

“The Three Musketeers” is to France what Mickey Mouse is to America — a cultural force with a lock on the country’s imagination. The 19th-century cloak-and-dagger tale, written by Alexandre Dumas, has lived countless lives onstage and onscreen, with stars, including Charlie Sheen, Charlton Heston, Milla Jovovich and even Barbie, resurrecting the classic tale of the Kings guard. It’s as iconically French as the Eiffel Tower, yet, until recently, it had been more than 60 years since the last French movie adaptation.Enter “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” and “Milady,” a gritty two-film franchise by the director Martin Bourboulon that seeks to…

The Oct. 7 attack on Israel has prompted soul-searching on the Israeli left, undermining faith in a shared future with Palestinians. It has created a crisis of confidence on the Israeli right, sapping support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It has drawn ultra-Orthodox Jews, often ambivalent about their relationship to the Israeli state, closer to the mainstream.Across religious and political divides, Israelis are coming to terms with what the Hamas-led terrorist attack meant for Israel as a state, for Israelis as a society, and for its citizens as individuals. Just as Israel’s failures in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war ultimately upended…

For months, Ukraine’s use of powerful Western-supplied air-defense systems to repel Russian missile attacks has provided its citizens with some reassurance that a protective shield was effectively in place over big cities such as the capital, Kyiv.On Friday, that shield partly cracked.In one of the biggest air assaults of the war, Russia launched so many missiles that the Ukrainian defenses seem to have been overloaded. Faced with a complex barrage of different airborne weapons, the Ukrainian Air Force said it had shot down only 87 of the 122 missiles fired by Moscow, about 70 percent of the total, with all…

On and off social media, watermelons are being used as a symbol to communicate solidarity with Palestinians in the deadly war between Israel and Hamas.The fruit is painted on semicircles of cardboard at protests in support of Palestinians. The watermelon emoji appears next to the Palestinian flag in display names on TikTok and X, and thousands of Instagram users have liked an illustration of a watermelon wedge whose seeds spell “ceasefire now.”The fruit is grown in Gaza and the West Bank, and it is the same four colors — red, green, black and white — as the Palestinian flag. Palestinians…

Mr. Granger had an early interest in food, bringing his parents a “silver service” of breakfast in bed from the age of 5 and working his way through magazine recipe cards, before turning his attention to the food writers Elizabeth David and Margaret Fulton. He feasted on Melbourne’s richly diverse cuisine, eating dim sum with the Chinese parents of a childhood friend and searching out Lebanese kofta, African curry and the “most pungent” Parmesan, he wrote in his most recent cookbook, “Australian Food” (2020).Like his father, he went to Mentone Grammar School, a private boys’ school at the time. In…

‘Fast Charlie’Rent or buy on most major platforms.I never knew I needed to hear Pierce Brosnan with a Southern accent until Phillip Noyce’s “Fast Charlie.” The former Bond plays the titular “problem solver,” as he calls himself, cooler than a summer breeze. A turf war between his boss, Stan (James Caan in one of his final film roles) and a New Orleans gangster named Beggar (Gbenga Akinnagbe) results in the apparent murder of Stan and his entire crew, pushing Charlie to seek vengeance before Beggar finds him, too. Charlie’s predicament also envelops his lover, Marcie (Morena Baccarin), a sharp-talking taxidermist.Charlie…