Aurelia Butler

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    6 Living Hostages Will Be Released to Israel This Weekend, Hamas Says

    The militant group’s chief negotiator also said Hamas would increase the number of living hostages it would release on Saturday to six from three.Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, said in a speech on Tuesday that militants intend to hand over the remains of four Israeli hostages to Israel on Thursday in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.Mr. Hayya said that members of the Bibas family would be among the four bodies handed over to Israel on Thursday. The three remaining members of the Bibas family in Gaza include Shiri Bibas and her two children.The Israeli prime minister’s office confirmed that the bodies of four Israelis would be returned on Thursday, but officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about whether the Bibas family would be among them. The Israeli military had said until recently that there were grave concerns for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though it had not confirmed their deaths.Israeli officials had said earlier on Tuesday that they expected the remains of Israeli hostages to be returned on Thursday, though they did not specify that members of the Bibas family would be among them.The number of living hostages scheduled to be released on Saturday will be increased to six from three, Mr. al-Hayya and the Israeli prime minister’s office said. More

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    Who Runs Elon Musk’s DOGE? Not Musk, the White House Says.

    Who, exactly, runs the so-called Department of Government Efficiency?You might think it would be Elon Musk, the man who President Trump said “will lead the Department of Government Efficiency” alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, before Mr. Ramaswamy stepped away from it last month.But when Mr. Trump set up the cost-cutting body in an executive order on his first day, the order did not say who its “administrator” would be. Section 3(b) of the order reads: “There shall be a USDS Administrator established in the Executive Office of the President who shall report to the White House Chief of Staff,” using the abbreviation for United States DOGE Service, the official name of the effort, which is not actually a cabinet-level department. Last week, White House representatives did not respond to repeated requests to identify that administrator.Then on Monday evening, a White House official stated plainly that “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.” The official, Joshua Fisher, made the statement in a declaration to a judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is hearing a case filed by Democratic attorneys general against Mr. Musk and the DOGE effort.Mr. Fisher added that Mr. Musk was “an employee in the White House Office” and “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.”Mr. Trump often talks about Mr. Musk as the functional leader of the DOGE effort, featuring him in a news conference last week where Mr. Musk answered questions about it.A lot of secrecy has surrounded DOGE despite Mr. Musk’s attempts to position it as “maximally transparent.” The White House’s unwillingness to state who its administrator is only adds to that sense of opacity.DOGE’s predecessor organization, the U.S. Digital Service, had administrators whose roles were public, most recently Mina Hsiang.Leaders of Mr. Musk’s effort who could conceivably be its “administrator” include Steve Davis, Mr. Musk’s right-hand man for two decades, who has overseen the day-to-day work of his efforts in Washington, and Brad Smith, an official in the first Trump administration who has been intimately involved in DOGE’s moves. A White House spokesperson did not respond to another request for comment on Monday evening in response to Mr. Fisher’s declaration.The administrator has several powers, according to the executive order. Those include helping agency heads choose their DOGE team members and starting a “Software Modernization Initiative” to update the government’s technology. A second executive order, released last week, said the DOGE administrator would receive a monthly hiring report from each federal agency and would submit a report in 240 days to Mr. Trump on the order’s implementation.It is not known who that report’s author will be. More

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    Arctic Air Could Bring Dangerous Temperatures to Parts of the U.S.

    And a winter storm could dump up to a foot of snow from the Central Plains to the East Coast.A powerful surge of arctic air from Canada will descend on the Central and Eastern United States this week, delivering record-breaking cold and dangerously low wind chills, forecasters said.A disruptive winter storm is also forecast to bring snow and ice from the Central Plains to the East Coast.The National Weather Service warned that this “widespread extreme cold threat” would send temperatures plunging 30 degrees below average near the Canadian border for the next couple of mornings. Numerous daily temperature records were likely to be broken, with below-zero high temperatures from Montana and the Dakotas to the upper Midwest and sections of the Central Plains. Freezing conditions may reach even the Gulf Coast by Thursday morning.Extreme cold warnings and cold-weather advisories were issued for areas across the northern Plains and upper Midwest down to central Texas, potentially affecting millions of people. More

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    They’ve Been Waiting Years to Go Public. They’re Still Waiting.

    Some tech companies are delaying or pulling their listing plans as the Trump administration’s tariff announcements and other changes cause market volatility and uncertainty.Turo, a car rental start-up in San Francisco, has been trying to go public since 2021. But a volatile stock market in early 2022 delayed its listing. Since then, the company has waited for the right moment.Last week, Turo pulled its listing entirely. “Now is not the right time,” Andre Haddad, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.For months, investors have eagerly anticipated a wave of initial public offerings, spurred by President Trump’s new administration. Since his election victory in November, which ended a tumultuous campaign season, Corporate America and Wall Street have heralded the start of a pro-business, anti-regulation period. The stock market soared ahead of an expected bonanza of deal making.But the administration’s tariff announcements and rapid-fire regulatory changes have created uncertainty and volatility. Worsening inflation has set off market jitters. And the emergence of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek last month caused investors to question their optimistic bets on U.S. tech, leading to a drastic sell-off among A.I.-related stocks.All that has affected initial public offerings. “The calendar just went from fully booked to being wide open in a span of like three weeks,” said Phil Haslett, a founder of EquityZen, a site that helps private companies and their employees sell their stock.So far this year, the pace of public offerings is ahead of last year’s, with companies raising $6.6 billion from listings, up 14 percent compared with this time last year, according to Renaissance Capital, which manages I.P.O.-focused exchange traded funds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    USAID Climate Programs Fighting Extremism and Unrest Are Closing Down

    Numerous programs aimed at averting violence, instability and extremism worsened by global warming are ensnared in the effort to dismantle the main American aid agency, U.S.A.I.D.One such project helped communities manage water stations in Niger, a hotbed of Islamist extremist groups where conflicts over scarce water are common. Another helped repair water-treatment plants in the strategic port city of Basra, Iraq, where dry taps had caused violent anti-government protests. The aid group’s oldest program, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, ran a forecasting system that allowed aid workers in places like war-torn South Sudan to prepare for catastrophic floods last year.The fate of these programs remains uncertain. The Trump administration has essentially sought to shutter the agency. A federal court has issued a temporary restraining order. On the ground, much of the work has stopped.“They were buying down future risk,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security and a former U.S. intelligence official. “Invest little today so we don’t have to spend a lot in the future when things metastasize.”The German government this week released a report calling climate change “the greatest security threat of our day and age,” echoing a U.S. intelligence report from 2021, which described climate hazards as “threat multipliers.”Some U.S.A.I.D. funding supported mediation programs to prevent local clashes over land or water. For instance, as the rains become erratic in the Sahel, clashes between farmers and cattle herders become more frequent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Street Style Look of the Week: Travel Outfits

    The word “timeless” came to mind when I glimpsed Gilang Al Ghifari Lukman, left, and Medina Janneta El-Rahman at a ferry landing in Istanbul while I was in the city on vacation last November. Though it has been months since we met, I thought of them as I prepared to go to Europe for fashion shows this month.They are the type of stylish people I always hope to bump into when I’m traveling — the kind who give me a chance to break out my vintage Rolleiflex film camera, a model that was used by noted fashion photographers like Richard Avedon and Bert Stern and that I do not get to use enough on the street these days.Mr. Lukman, 27, and Ms. Rahman, 25, live in Birmingham, England, and were vacationing in Istanbul. They told me that they always liked to dress smartly. Both grew up in Indonesia, and Mr. Lukman said his style was influenced by how people there dressed and by the elegant fashions of Britain’s Edwardian era.His handsome satchel was made of goat leather, he said, and sentimental to him: “It was purchased with my first-ever salary from a dishwashing part-time job while studying in Kyoto.”

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    Elon Musk Zeroes In on the I.R.S.

    The tech mogul’s cost-cutting initiative is seeking sensitive taxpayer data, drawing concerns about privacy, potential political retribution and more.Elon Musk, President Trump’s chief cost-cutter, has his sights now on the I.R.S., and Americans’ tax records.Eric Lee/The New York TimesThe fire hose of Elon Musk news continues: We’ve got more on the controversy over the access to sensitive I.R.S. data that Musk’s cost-cutting team is seeking and the resignation of a senior official at the Social Security Administration over a similar issue.And in case you missed it, there were two revealing long reads about the Murdoch family’s internal battles: one in The Times Magazine based on more than 3,000 pages of secret court transcripts, and another in The Atlantic that included intimate details directly from James Murdoch. Finally, here’s a great watch from over the weekend: Adam Sandler’s tribute on “Saturday Night Live” to Lorne Michaels, whom we profiled last year, during the show’s 50th anniversary special. Who gets access?Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is continuing to burrow deeper into the federal bureaucracy in search of what the tech mogul says are trillions in potential cost cuts.But the organization’s latest accomplishments, including the potential gaining of access to sensitive I.R.S. and Social Security Administration data, have raised yet more concerns about how much power Musk is amassing — and what the consequences could be.The latest: The I.R.S. is preparing to give Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer working with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, access to sensitive taxpayer information as a senior adviser to the I.R.S.’s acting commissioner. The I.R.S. is still working out the terms of his assignment, but as of Sunday evening, he hadn’t yet gained access to the data.Separately, the top official of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, resigned after Musk’s team sought access to an internal database that contains personal information about Americans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Nike Bets Big on Kim Kardashian

    The Skims founder will enter into a rare business deal with the sports apparel company.More than 40 years ago, Michael Jordan helped Nike become the name in basketball sneakers. Today it’s betting that Kim Kardashian can help it do the same for women’s shapewear.On Tuesday, Nike is announcing the creation of NikeSkims, a new brand in partnership with Skims, the shapewear Goliath co-founded by Ms. Kardashian. NikeSkims marks the first time that Nike has joined with an existing, outside company to introduce a new brand.“It’s this great clash of performance product — athlete tested, athlete inspired — with Skims’s incredible attention to the female form of the body and inclusivity,” said Heidi O’Neill, the president of consumer, product and brand at Nike.The brand, she said, will “serve women so they can feel strong and sexy.”The two companies have been working on NikeSkims since October 2023. Skims, which has conquered the shapewear market with its curve-accentuating leggings, bodysuits and tops, first reached out to Nike about working together.The initial crop of products will hit Skims and Nike websites and select stores in the United States in spring 2025. NikeSkims will roll out globally next year.If Skims’s shapewear is designed for everyday wear, NikeSkims will be targeted toward hourlong HIIT classes and sweaty treadmill sessions. It will utilize existing training-tested textiles, like Dri-Fit, as well as “innovations that are built more uniquely for Skims,” according to Ms. O’Neill. She did not share specifics on pricing, but a pair of Nike’s high-waist Dri-Fit leggings sells for $60, just a smidgen more than Skims’s $56 cotton leggings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More