The decision to fire Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot, broke a tradition in which the Joint Chiefs chairman remains in place with a new president.
Staff units evaluating high-tech surgical robots and insulin-delivery systems were gutted by Trump layoffs even though industry fees, not taxpayers, financed the employee salaries.
Moscow’s forces are three miles from Dnipropetrovsk, a province they have never invaded. If they cross in, the advance would be a morale blow to Ukraine and complicate any territorial negotiations.
Fate of Bibas Family Recalls Trauma of Oct. 7, Renewing Fears for Gaza Truce
Hamas said it had returned the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two sons. The Israeli military announced that the boys were murdered in Gaza and that Ms. Bibas’s body was that of someone else.
Kate Green celebrates the Revd Gilbert White, the original ecologist whose 1789 book on flora and fauna has never been out of print
Mad as a box of frogs
Our amphibious friends were once thought to possess mystical powers and they now aid the advance of medicine, as Ian Morton discovers
The ghost of golden daffodils
David Jones traces the fall and rise of the Tenby daffodil — all but extinct in the wild, but making a return as a cultivated bloom
The lure of Venice
Matthew Dennison investigates Britain’s long-standing love affair with the Italian maritime republic, fuelled by Canaletto’s enchanting, kaleidoscopic vedute
Playing the fool
Who could have foreseen the influence of tarot cards down the ages? Deborah Nicholls-Lee delves into decks and divination
Dr Ximena Fuentes Torrijo’s favourite painting
The Ambassador of Chile picks a vast, dreamlike Surrealist work that portrays a turbulent world.
A sense of delight
John Goodall marvels at the outstanding array of new and restored buildings on the grand Aldourie estate in Inverness-shire
Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tales
Matthew Dennison pays tribute to Peter and Iona Opie, who pre-served much-loved folklore and fairy tales for future generations
The good stuff
Work out in style with Hetty Lintell’s elegant exercise picks
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe shares the best of London Design Week wares, plus an elegant room with a view
Shaping the view
Tiffany Daneff admires the vista of rural Northamptonshire from the delightful Modernist garden created for a converted cart house
Foraging
Listen in as John Wright shares his thoughts on wood ears, the fungus with a gelatinous texture
Arts & antiques
Thomas Girtin’s exquisite landscapes were a match for Turner before the artist was cut down in his prime, reveals Carla Passino
History triumphs over invention
A brilliantly acted historical play conquers overproduced Greek mythology for Michael Billington
The interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District and five officials with the federal public integrity unit quit after the Justice Department ordered charges against Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped.
The president said his advisers would devise new tariff levels reflecting countries’ tariffs, taxes, subsidies and other policies affecting trade with the United States.
The vote capped a remarkable rise for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed by a Republican Senate in a chamber where his father and uncles once served as Democrats.
‘Risk of a Collision and Loss of Life’: D.C. Crash Warnings Were Years in the Making
Concerns that a deadly collision could occur at Reagan National Airport had long been building. But attempts to draw attention to potentially dangerous conditions sometimes went unheeded.
We’re just over three weeks into the second Donald Trump administration, and the pace of events both inside and outside the US has been dizzying and unprecedented.
Many of us have been alarmed by Trump’s shocking pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war, trade tariffs and territorial claims on Greenland and Panama. But inside America, an equally startling transformation has been taking place.
Aided by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has moved swiftly to fire critics, reward allies, punish media, gut the federal government and exploit presidential immunity. Yet much of the blueprint comes not from Trump’s own policy team, but from a power-consolidation playbook established over the past decade by the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.
The Times interviewed Russian soldiers who said they face a brutal fight to dislodge determined Ukrainian forces from a sliver of Russian land. Trapped civilians fear catastrophe.
Government investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies are stalling amid President Trump’s firings and Biden administration resignations.
Many Groups Promised Federal Aid Still Have No Funds and No Answers
Judicial rulings have unfrozen some grants awaited by nonprofits, states and companies, but the reprieve has been uneven and many fear the relief is only temporary.
Marion Milner believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal.
William had spent most of his life in the care of the state. His story was one of intergenerational trauma, common to many families in the West of Scotland, and of the lies Scotland tells itself about its treatment of its most vulnerable young people.
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.
While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (February 13, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Real Ruins?’ = Mary Beard on what gets left behind; AI’s literary triumph; A Nobel laureate’s prose falls short; The price of woke and Kissinger’s boys…
The Peronist Pope
The Argentine pontiff who accepts his own fallibility By A. N. Wilson
Boomers Daily 