You may remember that I’ve been blitzing my way through murder mysteries this winter. As it turns out, one Agatha Christie mystery is fun, two are interesting, but once you get past three or four, they start to raise real questions about the economic incentives of the early 20th century. If Jane Austen made a…
Hello darkness, our old friend, we’ve come to stare at you again. At the center of Messier 87, a giant galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth, is a darkness 24 billion miles across and as massive as 6.5 billion suns — a trapdoor to infinity called a black hole. In 2017, a group of astronomers…
Thousands of people were trapped at a hospital by heavy fighting in southern Gaza, and Israeli forces on Wednesday had surrounded a second hospital where displaced people were sheltering, aid agencies said, after Israel’s military ordered evacuations for that part of the city of Khan Younis. The evacuation order posted by the military’s Arabic-language spokesman,…
A fire in a commercial building in southeastern China killed at least 39 people on Wednesday, as emergency workers raced to rescue people still trapped inside. The fire broke out around 3:30 p.m. local time in Xinyu, a city in Jiangxi Province, in the basement of a building that housed an internet cafe on the…
Maximila Imali, a top Kenyan sprinter, did not lose her eligibility to compete in the Paris Olympics because she cheated. She did not fail a doping test. She broke no rules. Instead, she is set to miss this year’s Summer Games because she was born with a rare genetic variant that results in naturally elevated…
It has been six weeks since President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and since then, gas prices have doubled, inflation has soared and the value of the national currency has plummeted. Such turmoil, he had warned, should be expected. Fixing decades of economic problems would first require more pain, he said. Yet on Wednesday,…
A large Russian military transport plane crashed on Wednesday in the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine, state news agencies said, citing a statement by the Russian Defense Ministry. The ministry said that the plane carried 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being transferred to the region to be exchanged for Russian service…
No profit grows, Shakespeare once wrote, where no pleasure is taken. And so in the tedious march of life, we find joy in small things: The rising of the sun. A fine glass of wine. The greasy snap of a well-dressed potato crisp. But soft! Not so fast. Life affords no simple pleasures, and even…
Pita Limjaroenrat, the popular politician who was blocked from becoming Thailand’s prime minister, cleared a legal hurdle on Wednesday after the country’s Constitutional Court found that he was not guilty of violating election law, allowing him to be reinstated as a lawmaker. But Mr. Pita’s legal troubles are far from over — he and his…
The police in South Africa said on Wednesday that they had arrested a man who confessed to starting a fire in a derelict Johannesburg building last August that killed dozens of people, some of whom leaped to their deaths or were trapped behind locked security gates. The 29-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday on 76…
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