Elections

Seismologists said that severe earthquakes are relatively rare around the city and cannot be predicted. But if one were to hit, it could inflict serious damage.The earthquake that hit the Northeast on Friday morning rattled nerves but did not do much damage. Still, it left many New Yorkers wondering how afraid they should be of a bigger one hitting closer to the city.The answer? It’s hard to say.Some news reports suggest that a large earthquake is “due” in New York City because moderate ones — with a magnitude of 5 or more — typically occur every few hundred years. The last one took place in the 1700s. Friday’s earthquake, in comparison, was a magnitude 4.8.In 2008, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found that the risk of earthquakes in the New York City area was greater than previously believed. That is because smaller earthquakes occur regularly in New York City, like a magnitude 1.7 earthquake that was recorded in Astoria, Queens, in January.Experts caution that it is impossible to know when an earthquake will strike or how much damage it might cause. But if an earthquake much stronger than Friday’s were to hit closer to New York City, “it would be a different story,” said Kishor S. Jaiswal, a research structural engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey. Forecasts from the city suggest that such a quake could result in dozens of injuries and billions of dollars in damage.There were few reports of damage or injuries after Friday’s earthquake. Still, city officials said they were inspecting bridges, train tracks and buildings, and that people should be prepared for aftershocks for at least several days. There were 29 aftershocks as of Saturday afternoon, including one with a magnitude of 3.8, according to U.S.G.S.Earthquakes with a similar magnitude to Friday’s are “rare, but they’re not unheard-of” close to New York City, said Leslie Sonder, an associate professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth College.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

Israel’s military said on Saturday that it had recovered the body of a man who was taken hostage from one of the communities hardest hit during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, almost six months to the day after his abduction.The man, Elad Katzir, 47, was killed in mid-January while being held in Gaza, an Israeli military official said in a news briefing on Saturday. The circumstances of his death could not be confirmed. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the military operation.He had lived in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the border with the Gaza Strip. Over a quarter of its more than 400 residents were either killed or abducted in the attack — including Mr. Katzir’s father, Avraham, who was killed, and mother, Hanna, was also taken hostage, according to the Israeli military.Hanna Katzir was released in November as part of a brief cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas in which more than 100 hostages were returned. The return of Ms. Katzir, 76, stunned some of her family members, because Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group backed by Iran, had earlier claimed that she was dead.The families of the remaining 133 hostages held in Gaza have expressed mounting anger and despair, saying that the Israeli government is not doing enough to reach a deal for their release. On Saturday, Mr. Katzir’s sister, Carmit, denounced the Israeli government for not reaching an agreement in time to secure her brother’s release.“He could have been saved if there had been a deal in time,” she wrote of her brother on Facebook. “But our leadership are cowards, motivated by political considerations, and thus it did not happen.”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

Sobhita Dhulipala considers herself an outsider — wherever she is.She grew up in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, making her an outsider in the country’s financial and fashion capital, Mumbai. Her native tongue is Telugu, making her an outsider in predominantly Hindi-speaking Bollywood.And now, with the release on Friday of the high-octane, Jordan Peele-produced “Monkey Man,” in which she stars alongside Dev Patel, she is again an outsider, thrust into Hollywood’s limelight. In fact, the premiere of the film at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, last month was the first time Ms. Dhulipala, 31, had ever set foot on American soil.“In India, I’m South Indian,” Ms. Dhulipala, who lives in Mumbai, said in a video interview from her hotel room in Los Angeles. “When I come to America, I’m Indian.”“It’s amazing that I get to come to this country with a film,” she added. “It’s like I come with an offering.”In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala portrayed a social climber, navigating her way to ever higher rungs of Indian society.Amazon Prime Video IndiaThat real-life feeling of being an outsider is the undercurrent for many of her onscreen roles. In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala’s character is a low-income nobody who schemes her way into upper-class circles. In “Monkey Man,” she plays Sita, a call girl whose business is the pleasure of powerful but despicable men.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

The New England Journal of Medicine published an article condemning its own record during World War II.A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis.The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.”In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended.The new article, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the journal’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s.“Learning from our past mistakes can help us going forward,” said the journal’s editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure that we don’t fall into the same sorts of objectionable ideas in the future?”In the publication’s archives, Dr. Abi-Rached discovered a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis’ emphasis on public health, which was infused with dubious ideas about Germans’ innate superiority.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

Employers have been adding jobs since Joe Biden took office, but will the good news translate into votes?Labor painsOne of the more puzzling aspects of the U.S. economy is that employers have been on an almost uninterrupted hiring spree since President Biden took office — and analysts see no signs that the trend will reverse any time soon.The paradox is that there is no guarantee that the jobs boom will keep Biden in the White House beyond November, completely scrambling the adage “It’s the economy, stupid” that wins elections.For 39 straight months, employers have added jobs despite many predictions that the United States was destined for a recession. They have also faced a long list of challenges, that have hobbled many of America’s peers, including high inflation and interest rates; wars in Ukraine and Gaza that have sent energy prices soaring; and shipping turmoil in the Panama Canal, Red Sea and now the Port of Baltimore.March was another blockbuster for jobs. The latest data released Friday overshot analysts’ expectations by a huge margin, with employers adding 303,000 jobs. That takes the tally over the past 12 months to more than 2.8 million hires — and economists expect the upward course to continue. “We do think there’s still room for growth” into next year, Jeremy Schwartz, a senior U.S. economist at Nomura, told DealBook.It’s less certain if Biden will be able to capitalize on that in his race with Donald Trump. The White House heralded the latest numbers as “a milestone in America’s comeback,” and held it up as proof that the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, two signature pieces of Biden’s agenda, were growing the economy.But the red-hot labor market could just as easily exacerbate two of Biden’s big vulnerabilities: inflation, with strong wages fueling a surge in spending that pushes up prices on everything from gasoline to concert tickets; and higher-for-longer interest rates to counteract those price rises. A growing chorus of Wall Street analysts were forecasting that the Fed would be in no rush to reduce borrowing costs after yesterday’s report.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

President Biden continued to build on his commanding financial advantage over former President Donald J. Trump, raising more than $90 million in March together with the Democratic Party and affiliated committees, his campaign said.Mr. Biden, the party and their shared accounts now have $192 million on hand going into April, according to his campaign — more than double what Mr. Trump reported in his coffers this week. Since Mr. Biden began his re-election bid, 1.6 million Americans have donated money to him, his campaign said, reflecting a broad base of financial support.These are “real investments that real Americans are making into this campaign,” said Rufus Gifford, the Biden campaign’s finance chair.Mr. Gifford suggested that the campaign’s fund-raising strength was more important than polls that have consistently showed Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump.“You can’t lie about the numbers,” Mr. Gifford said. “They’re not theoretical. It’s not a random poll that is just one moment in time.”The president’s numbers were fueled by a $26 million haul from a fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York City that featured former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. His campaign also said he raised $10 million in the 24 hours after his State of the Union address on March 7.Mr. Trump has increased the pace of his own fund-raising, hosting wealthy donors at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. His campaign said it and the Republican National Committee raised $65.6 million in March, Mr. Trump’s best fund-raising month so far. Trump campaign aides say they plan to out-raise Mr. Biden’s three-president bash with a major fund-raiser of their own on Saturday in Palm Beach.But Mr. Biden’s prodigious March may take some of the wind out of Mr. Trump’s sails.“We’ve got all the momentum now, and I think you’re going to continue to see it,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chair of the Biden campaign. “These are spectacular outcomes for the campaign and a vote of confidence for the president and vice president.”Of course, having the most money does not guarantee victory. And there are signs that Mr. Trump may continue to up his fund-raising.March was the first month that Mr. Trump, now his party’s presumptive nominee, started to raise money in joint accounts with the R.N.C. Those accounts can accept far larger donations than Mr. Trump was allowed to in the primary.Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts roughly doubled their available cash on hand going into April. That figure now stands at $93.1 million, although it is still far less than Mr. Biden and the Democrats.Shane Goldmacher More

People cross boundaries in Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Spell” and Penelope Lively’s “The Photograph.”Should you feel like a creep reading about transgressive family affairs on the subway?Librado Romero/The New York TimesDear readers,“My sister. My daughter. … She’s my sister and my daughter!” If you’ve ever seen Roman Polanski’s sun-bleached neo-noir “Chinatown,” which turns 50 this year, you can’t forget it: a defiant, tear-stained Faye Dunaway wailing the sordid secret of her troubled-heiress character’s life while Jack Nicholson’s flinty detective Jake Gittes slaps her halfway to next Saturday.I thought of that scene again recently after reading a much-passed-around piece in The Atlantic about the surprising prevalence of incest that has been exposed by test results from popular ancestry sites like 23AndMe. And I felt smugly justified in never getting around to swabbing myself with one of the two DNA kits, still languishing somewhere at home in a junk drawer, that I’d received as thoughtful but vaguely terrifying gifts. Better, perhaps, to never know that you are 6.7 percent Slavic highlander, and also that your great-uncle is actually your grandpa.The two books in this week’s column are not about that sort of flowers-in-the-attic depravity (or even the highbrow provocation of literary fire-starters like Kathryn Harrison’s fevered 1997 memoir “The Kiss”). But they do cast a sometimes-discomfiting eye on blood ties: tales of romance and longing that transgress most good people’s idea of familial propriety, and sometimes cross much starker lines. Should you feel like a creep reading these on the subway? Forget it, Jake; it’s fiction.—Leah“The Spell,” by Alan HollinghurstFiction, 1998We 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

The latest assault on the eastern city killed at least six people, local authorities said. As Kyiv waits on American aid, Moscow has stepped up bombardments, including using modified “glide bombs.”Russian rockets slammed into residential buildings in Kharkiv before dawn on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said, killing at least six people and injuring at least 11 more in the latest assault on Ukraine’s second-largest city.“Russian terror against Kharkiv continues,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a statement. “It’s crucial to strengthen the air defense for the Kharkiv region. And our partners can help us with this.”Ukraine’s air defenses have come increasingly under strain since American military support stopped flowing into the country more than six months ago, and future assistance remains uncertain amid Republican resistance in Congress to a $60 billion aid package.Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, has hinted that he would soon bring the issue of military aid for Ukraine to a vote in the House, but has also said that he might tie the issue to unrelated matters like domestic energy policies that could complicate its passage.At the same time, Russia has replenished and expanded its stockpile of missiles, guided bombs and attack drones and is stepping up its bombardments across the country.Mr. Zelensky said this past week that “in March alone, Russian terrorists used over 400 missiles of various types, 600 Shahed drones and over 3,000 guided aerial bombs against Ukraine.”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