Israeli soldiers and Palestinian former detainees say troops have regularly forced captured Gazans to carry out life-threatening tasks, including inside Hamas tunnels.
Defections from Black and Latino voters are making Kamala Harris more dependent on white, suburban voters — and complicating her path to victory.
Attention Kmart Shoppers: It’s Closing Time
As the last full-size Kmart in the continental United States prepares to close, shoppers reminisced about the store that once sold everything, everywhere.
Major studies of Albert Einstein’s work contain minimal, if any, reference to the role of German mathematician Emmy Noether. Yet, she was crucial in resolving a paradox in general relativity through her theorem connecting symmetry and energy-conservation laws, published in 1918. When Noether died in 1935, Einstein called her “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began”. In this book about her for the general reader, physicist Lee Phillips brings Noether alive.
Silk Roads
Sue Brunning et al. British Museum Press (2024)
The first object discussed in this lavishly illustrated British Museum exhibition book reveals the far-ranging, mysterious nature of the Silk Roads. It is a Buddha figure, excavated in Sweden from a site dated to around ad 800, and probably created in Pakistan two centuries earlier. No one knows how it reached Europe or its significance there. As the authors — three of them exhibition curators — admit, it is “impossible to capture the full extent and complexity of the Silk Roads in a single publication”— even by limiting their time frame to only five centuries.
The Last Human Job
Allison Pugh Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
A century ago, notes sociologist Allison Pugh, people doing their food shopping gave lists to shop workers, who retrieved the goods then haggled over the prices. The process epitomized what she terms connective labour, which involves “an emotional understanding with another person to create the outcomes we think are important”. A healthy society requires more connective labour, not more automation, she argues in her engaging study, which observes and interviews physicians, teachers, chaplains, hairdressers and more.
Becoming Earth
Ferris Jabr Random House (2024)
According to science journalist Ferris Jabr, his intriguing book about Earth — divided into three sections on rock, water and air — is “an exploration of how life has transformed the planet, a meditation on what it means to say that Earth itself is alive”. If this definition sounds similar to the Gaia hypothesis by chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis, that is welcome to Jabr, who admires Lovelock as a thinker and personality. He also recognizes how the 1970s hypothesis, which evolved over decades, still divides scientists.
Into the Clear Blue Sky
Rob Jackson Scribner (2024)
Earth scientist Rob Jackson chairs the Global Carbon Project, which works to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve air and water quality. His book begins hopefully on a visit to Rome, where Vatican Museums conservators discuss the “breathtaking” restoration of the blue sky in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgement, damaged by centuries of grime and visitors’ exhalations. But he ends on a deeply pessimistic note on a research boat in Amazonia, which is suffering from both floods and fires: the “Hellocene”.
Both parties are frenetically chasing votes in the counties that could very well decide the election. In many places, inexperienced conservative groups are going up against a more tightly organized Democratic operation.
Donald J. Trump is feeling aggrieved, unappreciated by donors and fenced in by security concerns in the final stretch of the race.
California Tries ‘Trump-Proofing’ Its Climate Policies
A second Trump administration would be expected to shred climate polices. California officials are devising ways to insulate its environmental regulations.
Vice President Kamala Harris is on track to win a majority of Black voters, and has brought many back to her party since taking over for President Biden. Still, a significant gap in support persists.
The Times reviewed the minutes of 10 meetings among Hamas’s top leaders. The records show the militant group avoided several escalations since 2021 to falsely imply it had been deterred — while seeking Iranian support for a major attack.
In the years since he left the White House, former President Donald J. Trump has remained a force in international politics, meeting with a number of foreign leaders and operating out of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Susie Wiles, a top Trump campaign adviser, was in contact with the White House chief of staff and the head of the Secret Service seeking military assets and other steps.
Politicians run most of the mills in the state of Maharashtra. They deny or downplay evidence of coerced hysterectomies, debt bondage and child labor in the fields.
For Atomic Bomb Survivors, a Nobel Prize and a Reckoning, 80 Years Later
Toshiyuki Mimaki, the chairman of Nihon Hidankyo, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said his foremost wish was to “please abolish nuclear weapons while we are alive.”
Israel was behind the attack, Lebanon said, and it came on the same day that the U.N. said Israeli forces had fired on its peacekeepers, an episode that drew international condemnation.
Eight years ago, he won over many white voters, who were often called the forgotten Americans. Now, he hopes to make inroads with Black and Latino voters by stoking resentments and pointing to scapegoats.
The latest polling from The New York Times and Siena College shows Republicans leading in key Senate races in Montana, Texas and Florida.
Ethel Kennedy, Passionate Supporter of the Family Legacy, Dies at 96
She never remarried after the assassination of her husband, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and she devoted herself to working on behalf of the causes he had championed.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pouring more money, time and energy into Pennsylvania than anywhere else, waging an ad war as they crisscross the state.
The F.D.A. has authorized shipments from overseas plants to ease shortages of IV bags caused by Hurricane Helene as hospitals begin rationing fluids to protect the sickest patients.
A week into the ground war between Israel and Hezbollah, shelters in Lebanon are filling up beyond capacity, humanitarian officials warned.
Behind Trump’s Views on Ukraine: Putin’s Gambit and a Political Grudge
The roots of Donald Trump’s animus toward Ukraine — an issue with profound consequences should he be elected again — can be found in a yearlong series of events spanning 2016 and 2017.
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