Author: NY TIMES

The semiconductor giant Intel confirmed on Wednesday that it would invest $25 billion to expand a chip factory in southern Israel after a $3.2 billion grant from the government there, moving ahead with a major investment in a country currently at war.Expanded operations at the existing manufacturing site in Kiryat Gat, northeast of Gaza, are set to begin by 2028 and last through at least 2035, and are expected to create thousands of jobs.“The expansion plan for the Kiryat Gat site is an important part of Intel’s efforts to foster a more resilient global supply chain,” Intel said in a…

Workers from South Asia are heading to Israel, whose need for labor has become more pressing since the Hamas-led attack in October.Israel’s government closed crossings from the West Bank, cutting off thousands of Palestinians from work, and many of the foreign workers that Israel relies on to operate its farms and construction industry left. Most of the roughly 30,000 foreign agricultural workers in Israel were from Thailand, dozens of whom were kidnapped or killed on Oct. 7.In the coming weeks, thousands of people from India and Sri Lanka will be sent to Israel, officials in the three countries said, as…

The knot in my stomach tightens. I realize that in every experience with racism, I am never given the benefit of the doubt. “No,” I say, “I don’t think so.”When I get back to my dorm room, I decide to put the incident away. And when I process what happened a few days later, it is in therapy. I have the session over Zoom, alone in my room. After I describe what happened, I tell my therapist that it didn’t bother me too much.“It’s OK,” I insist.“No, it’s not,” she says.We sit in silence for a moment. I think about…

A plane crash that killed dozens of people in Nepal in January was caused by a pilot who pulled the incorrect levers while trying to land, the country’s investigators said Thursday.The pilot changed the propeller angle instead of that of the wing flaps, causing a Yeti Airlines plane to lose momentum and fall, killing all 72 people on board, a report by a committee formed by the Nepali government said.The ATR-72 plane, a twin-engine propeller aircraft, was on a half-hour flight from the capital, Kathmandu, carrying 68 passengers and four crew members when it crashed on Jan. 15. The pilots…

Jerry Yu reúne las características de lo que los chinos llaman un rico de segunda generación. Estudió en una escuela preparatoria de Connecticut. Vive en un condominio de Manhattan que le vendió Jeffrey R. Immelt, exdirector ejecutivo de General Electric, en 8 millones de dólares. Y es el dueño mayoritario de una mina de bitcóin en Texas, que fue adquirida por más de 6 millones de dólares el año pasado.Yu, un estudiante de 23 años de la Universidad de Nueva York, también se ha convertido —sin querer— en un caso de estudio sobre cómo los ciudadanos chinos pueden mover dinero…

Ye, the rapper and producer formerly known as Kanye West, apologized to the Jewish community on Tuesday for a series of antisemitic comments he made last year.“It was not my intention to offend or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused,” Ye said in an Instagram post that was written in Hebrew. “I am committed to starting with myself and learning from this experience to ensure greater sensitivity and understanding in the future. Your forgiveness is important to me, and I am committed to making amends and promoting unity.”Ye became embroiled in controversy in October 2022…

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel exchanged sharp words on Wednesday after Mr. Erdogan compared the Israeli leader to Adolf Hitler while discussing Israel’s war in Gaza.‘‘Is what Netanyahu is doing any less than Hitler? It is not,’’ Mr. Erdogan said in televised remarks in Ankara, Turkey, at a science awards ceremony. The Turkish leader has frequently criticized Israel for its conduct in Gaza.“They were talking ill of Hitler. What difference do you have from Hitler? They will make us miss Hitler,” Mr. Erdogan said.Mr. Netanyahu fired back, slamming Mr. Erdogan’s treatment of…

On a recent evening inside the Hotel de la Poste, an alpine hotel in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy’s most ski-and-be-seen winter destination, a boisterous party celebrated the birth of a cinematic era.Forty years earlier, the libidinous, up-chalet down-chalet comedy “Christmas Holiday,” set in the lodge, was released. Nominally about a plain but lucky-in-adultery piano bar singer and the wealthy Milanese, salt-of-the-earth Romans and tuxedoed bons vivants who surround him, the film previewed decades of gleefully vulgar, broad and formulaic Christmas comedies that earned a fortune and came to be known, after the cakes Italians devour during the season, as “Cinema Panettone.”To…

The artist Eduardo Kac was at his New York gallery the other day to show a reporter his work: a hologram encoded on a sliver of glass resting inside a tiny metal case. This little package is the capstone of Kac’s career to date — an artifact he created in 1986 that is now, finally, about to find its intended home in space. On Jan. 8 it is scheduled to be on board a Vulcan Centaur rocket as it lifts off from Cape Canaveral and heads into orbit around the sun. This holographic artwork — a “holopoem,” Kac calls it…

The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law.Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suit over the past year, contending that their intellectual property was illegally used to train A.I. systems, which can produce humanlike prose and power applications like chatbots.Now they have been joined in the spotlight by the news industry. The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, the first such challenge by a major American news organization over the use of…