Elections

Saudi Arabia will chair a United Nations commission on women, bringing condemnation from human rights groups, which said the kingdom still has an “abysmal” record on women’s rights.Saudi Arabia won an uncontested bid to lead a United Nations body dedicated to women’s rights for the 2025 session, bringing condemnation from human rights groups that argued that the kingdom had an “abysmal” record on women’s empowerment.On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.N., Abdulaziz Alwasil, was elected chairman of the Commission on the Status of Women, a U.N. body whose aim is to protect and promote women’s rights around the world.The Saudi state news agency wrote that the country’s new chairmanship “confirmed its interest in cooperating with the international community to strengthen women’s rights and empowerment” and highlighted strides the country had made toward greater social and economic freedom for women.But the decision drew scathing criticism from human rights groups. Amnesty International’s deputy director for advocacy, Sherine Tadros, said in a statement that Saudi Arabia had an “abysmal record when it comes to protecting and promoting the rights of women.” She argued that there was a “vast gulf” between the U.N. commission’s aspirations and the “lived reality for women and girls in Saudi Arabia.”The commission, established in 1946, has 45 members that are selected based on geographic quotas. No vetting process is required for a country to be elected to the commission, and there is also no requirement that it meet certain standards of gender rights to join.Saudi Arabia had been expected to win the chairmanship, which typically lasts two years, and its bid was reported to have drawn no dissent from other member states.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

My entire life I’ve seen a similar pattern. Older generations reflect on the deficiencies of “kids these days,” and they find something new to blame. The latest technology and new forms of entertainment are always bewitching our children. In my time, I’ve witnessed several distinct public panics over television, video games and music. They’ve all been overblown.This time, however, I’m persuaded — not that smartphones are the sole cause of increasing mental health problems in American kids, but rather that they’re a prime mover in teen mental health in a way that television, games and music are not. No one has done more to convince me than Jonathan Haidt. He’s been writing about the dangers of smartphones and social media for years, and his latest Atlantic story masterfully marshals the evidence for smartphones’ negative influence on teenage life.At the same time, however, I’m wary of government intervention to suppress social media or smartphone access for children. The people best positioned to respond to their children’s online life are parents, not regulators, and it is parents who should take the lead in responding to smartphones. Otherwise, we risk a legal remedy that undermines essential constitutional doctrines that protect both children and adults.I don’t want to minimize the case against phones. Haidt’s thesis is sobering:Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected.The consequences, Haidt argues, have been dire. Children — especially teenagers — are suffering from greater rates of anxiety and depression, and suicide rates have gone up; and they spend less time hanging out with friends, while loneliness and friendlessness are surging.Neither smartphones nor social media are solely responsible for declining teen mental health. The rise of smartphones correlates with a transformation of parenting strategies, away from permitting free play and in favor of highly managed schedules and copious amounts of organized sports and other activities. The rise of smartphones also correlates with the fraying of our social fabric. Even there, however, the phones have their roles to play. They provide a cheap substitute for in-person interaction, and the constant stream of news can heighten our anxiety.I’m so convinced that smartphones have a significant negative effect on children that I’m now much more interested in the debate over remedies. What should be done?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

New survey questions in federal forms will draw a more detailed portrait of racial and ethnic origins. Officials point to the benefits, but the changes could face a conservative backlash.The Biden administration ordered changes to a range of federal surveys on Thursday to gather more detailed information about the nation’s ethnic and racial makeup.The changes — the first in decades to standard questions that the government asks about race and ethnicity — would produce by far the most detailed portrait of the nation’s ancestral palette ever compiled. And a new option will be available for the first time allowing respondents to identify as part of a new category, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.But the changes also have the potential to rankle conservatives who believe that the nation’s focus on diversity has already gone too far.An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a BoxCensus categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.The revisions, released after 21 months of study and public comment, apply not just to the Census Bureau, but across the government, to forms as varied as the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey and applications for Social Security cards. They take effect this month, but federal agencies will be allowed years to fully implement them.Current surveys contain a separate option for people of ethnic Hispanic and Latino descent to claim that identity, followed by another question that offers multiple options for respondents to choose one or more races.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

Käthe Kollwitz’s fierce belief in social justice and her indelible images made her one of Germany’s best printmakers. A dazzling MoMA show reminds us why.An artist friend texted me recently, asking how to contend with the anger and sadness she was feeling about the state of the world. I can think of no better balm than the Museum of Modern Art’s Käthe Kollwitz retrospective, the first ever at a New York museum that encompasses this German artist’s groundbreaking prints and drawings and her sculpture, posters and magazine illustrations.Once you’re there, go straight over to her series “Peasants’ War,” which she started in 1902, to find her own outlet for her burning desire for radical change. She was about 10 years into her already successful career when she made it, a remarkable feat given that she was a woman in a country that still didn’t allow women into art schools. In 1898, she had been nominated for a gold medal at the Greater Berlin Art Exhibition for her first major print cycle, “A Weavers’ Revolt” (1893-97), but did not receive it: The Prussian minister of culture thought her subject matter — a fictional uprising based on a contemporary play about an 1844 revolt, a watershed moment for many German socialists — too politically subversive, while Kaiser Wilhelm II himself objected to the idea of a woman garnering top prize.Born in 1867, Kollwitz was an avowed socialist whose career stretched from the 1890s to the 1940s, a period of tremendous social upheaval and two world wars. Though she was a member of the progressive Berlin Secession art movement, she kept a distance from the elite art world, living in a working-class Berlin neighborhood with her husband, a doctor who tended to the poor.Display of posters by Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA, left to right: “Vienna is dying! Save its Children,” 1920; “The Survivors,” 1923; “Help Russia,” 1921; “Never Again War!” from 1924; poster to legalize abortion, from 1923; “Release our Prisoners,” 1919. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith “Peasants’ War,” Kollwitz again turned to the past to share her outrage at the injustices around her “which are never ending and as large as a mountain.” The seven-part series deals with the historical revolt that swept German-speaking countries of Central Europe in the 16th century, not as a transcription of historical events but as an imagined narrative showing the exploitation of farm workers (men treated no better than animals yoked to a plow, a woman in the aftermath of a rape by a landowner), their explosive response, and the chilling repression that followed. It is a story worthy of Charles Dickens or Émile Zola, told from a woman’s point of view.The largest print, “Charge,” focuses on the figure of “Black Anna,” reputed to be a catalyst of the violence, urging a mob of peasants to action. She is no “Liberty Leading the People.” Unlike Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 image of a beautiful and bare-breasted personification of French freedom, Kollwitz’s crone is shown from the back, her sinewy arms raised and hands clenched urgently, practically launching herself into the crowd.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

What happened when Karl Lagerfeld’s last residence, where he worked and where Choupette lived, was offered at auction.Karl Lagerfeld was a mega-collector. Of high-collared white shirts (1,000). Of books (300,000). Of period décor (Art Deco, Memphis Group, 18th-century European). And of homes — at least 20, in Europe and in New York.“He loved buying, redesigning and decorating houses,” said Sébastien Jondeau, the longtime assistant and bodyguard of the fashion designer, who died in 2019 at the age of 85. “It was a true passion.”One of those homes, the Bond-villain-like lair on the Quai Voltaire in Paris that was Mr. Lagerfeld’s last residence — sold at auction at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Paris on Tuesday for 10 million euros ($10.8 million). More than 50 attendees gathered for the sale of the 2,800-square-foot apartment, which Mr. Lagerfeld shared with Choupette, his beloved blue-eyed Birman cat. Bidding began shortly after 10 a.m. at 5.3 million euros, and quickly turned into a standoff between two parties: one who was off-site and communicating through an auction official in the room via a landline telephone, the other who was represented by a French lawyer seated in the second row and taking instruction on his cellphone.The sale of Mr. Lagerfeld’s apartment comes at a time of renewed interest in the designer.Christophe Ena/Associated PressThe lawyer, who would not give his name for reasons of confidentiality, appeared to be taking direction in English from his client via a telephone earpiece. Offers bounced between the two bidders by increments of 50,000 to 150,000 euros for nearly 20 minutes, until the lawyer’s bid jumped from 9.3 million euros to 10 million euros. The auction official on the landline with the telephone bidder made a hand motion that her bidder stood down. When the auctioneer, Bertrand Savouré, announced that the apartment had been sold, attendees erupted in applause. Mr. Savouré would not reveal the buyer’s name or nationality.Proceeds of the sale go to Mr. Lagerfeld’s estate, which will be distributed to Mr. Lagerfeld’s seven heirs: the former model Baptiste Giabiconi, who will receive 30 percent; Mr. Jondeau and the former model Brad Kroenig (the father of Mr. Lagerfeld’s godson, Hudson) will each receive 20 percent; and the Chanel artistic director Virginie Viard, Mr. Lagerfeld’s creative muse Amanda Harlech and the Karl Lagerfeld brand executives Caroline Lebar and Sophie de Langlade, who will split the remaining 30 percent, according to the French weekly magazine Le Point.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

Ashlee Wiseman, a waitress at a Sizzler in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was 10 weeks pregnant when a nurse phoned with crushing news: a test of fetal DNA in her blood had found that her baby girl had trisomy 18, a catastrophic genetic abnormality, and was unlikely to survive.Devastated, she called her partner, Clint Risenmay, who was at work. He broke down in tears.Ashlee’s response was different.“A still small voice took over me,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’m not going to listen to them. There has to be something that can help her. And there has to be someone who can help.’”A social media search led her to Dr. John Carey, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Utah, who has devoted his life to helping families dealing with trisomy 18. He supports pregnant women who chose abortion, but also helps couples who want to have babies with this rare condition, though most will be stillborn or die within a year.Ashlee and Clint were undeterred. They could do it, they assured Dr. Carey. They would lovingly care for a baby with complex medical needs.The consequences of trisomy 18 are dire. The babies have three copies of chromosome 18 instead of two and, as a result, have serious medical and developmental problems. Nearly all are unable to eat, walk or talk, and all have severe cognitive disabilities. They often need open-heart surgery and feeding and breathing tubes. Many women, after hearing what is in store, choose abortion.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 producer has helped shape rap for the past decade, providing moody beats for Atlanta’s biggest stars and beyond. His latest LP, with Future, arrived last week.Since 2013, Metro Boomin has crafted the beats behind more than 75 songs that reached Billboard’s Hot 100, including 12 Top 10 hits. The Atlanta-via-St. Louis producer has turned contemporary radio into a shadowy world of nocturnal 808 drums and sinister synths while providing breakout moments for Atlanta rappers including Future, Migos and 21 Savage.Metro Boomin, now 30, emerged as a solo artist in 2017, but he has remained a vital collaborator. Two years later, he helped write “Heartless,” a No. 1 single for the Weeknd, and he oversaw the soundtrack for the 2023 sequel “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” This year, he was up for producer of the year, non-classical, at the Grammys (and lost to Jack Antonoff). Next week, he’s poised to claim his fourth No. 1 album with “We Don’t Trust You,” his 17-track collaboration with the woozy tunesmith Future. (A second project by the pair is due April 12.) Here are some of the crucial moments on his path to becoming hip-hop’s premier sculptor of sonic storm clouds.Listen on Apple Music and Spotify.Future featuring Lil Wayne, “Karate Chop (Remix)” (2013)Released in the run-up to Future’s highly anticipated second album, “Honest,” “Karate Chop” features a kaleidoscopic mix of sparkling arpeggios and buzzing synths. Metro Boomin was not sold on the beat, which he had crafted before his move to Atlanta, but Future became infatuated with it. The song became the first charting single to bear the producer’s credit, released while the 19-year-old Metro was a freshman at Morehouse College. “I had no clue from all the records we’ve done,” he told XXL, that this “would be the one. But these days, the people and the streets produce the singles.”ILoveMakonnen featuring Drake, “Tuesday” (2014)Produced with Sonny Digital and ILoveMakonnen, the breezy, peculiar “Tuesday” became Metro Boomin’s first Top 20 pop hit. Spacious, ethereal and recorded at Metro Boomin’s house, the track’s disorienting, calliope-style melody and barely there drums leave an open gulf for ILoveMakonnen’s singsong vocal to shine. “Every song with him is like one take,” Metro Boomin said of Makonnen in The Fader. “Even if he messes up at a little part, he’ll leave it, so it’s organic and raw. That’s why people love it. It’s breaking the rules.”From left, Future, Travis Scott, and Metro Boomin attending A Night With Future DS2 in 2015 in New York City.Johnny Nunez/WireImage, via Getty ImagesFuture featuring Drake, “Where Ya At” (2015)Future’s first three Top 40 hits — “Where Ya At,” the Drake collaboration “Jumpman,” and “Low Life” — all came courtesy of Metro Boomin. The first, an ice-cold trap pounder that sounds like the tortured strings of a prepared piano, provided a blueprint for the two-times-platinum “What a Time to Be Alive,” the full-length collaboration from Future and Drake, where Metro Boomin served as executive producer.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 company that owns the Merrimack and Schiller stations in New Hampshire plans to turn them into solar farms and battery storage for offshore wind.The last two coal-fired power plants in New England are set to close by 2025 and 2028, ending the use of a fossil fuel that supplied electricity to the region for more than 50 years.The decision to close the Merrimack and Schiller stations, both in New Hampshire, makes New England the second region in the country, after the Pacific Northwest, to stop burning coal.Environmentalists waged a five-year legal battle against the New Hampshire plants, saying that the owner had discharged warm water from steam turbines into a nearby river without cooling it first to match the natural temperature.In a settlement reached on Wednesday with the Sierra Club and the Conservative Law Foundation, Granite Shore Power, the owner of the plants, agreed that Schiller would not run after Dec. 31, 2025 and that Merrimack would cease operations no later than June 2028.“This announcement is the culmination of years of persistence and dedication from so many people across New England,” said Gina McCarthy, a former national climate adviser to President Biden and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration who is now a senior adviser at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which supports efforts to phase out coal.“I’m wicked proud to live in New England today and be here,” Ms. McCarthy said. “Every day, we’re showing the rest of the country that we will secure our clean energy future without compromising.”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