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The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month.Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which draws 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”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?  More

An accordion virtuoso and a gifted vocalist, he scored country hits in the 1980s by putting a Cajun spin on songs like Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter.”Jo-El Sonnier, the singer and accordionist who revived Cajun music within popular culture with hit versions of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and with appearances on recordings by Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello, died on Jan. 13 after a performance in Llano, Texas. He was 77.The cause was a heart attack, the music promoter Tracy Pitcox wrote on social media. He said Mr. Sonnier had been airlifted to a hospital in Austin, where he was pronounced dead.Recordings by Cajun singers and players of stringed instruments like Rusty and Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman often reached the country Top 40 in the 1950s and ’60s. But it wasn’t until Mr. Sonnier’s arrival three decades later that Cajun accordion music became more than a regional phenomenon.Mr. Sonnier in 1966, when he was 20 years old. A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he first picked up the accordion when he was 3.via Sonnier familyWe 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?  More

The former first daughter’s short, “The Heart,” focuses on a sensitive man racked with guilt when his mother dies after they have an argument.If you’re a celebrity seeking to rebrand, the Sundance Film Festival can offer a useful assist. From Marvel superheroes seeking an indie turn to teenage movie stars hoping to segue into spicy adult roles, the snowy event is the perfect place to debut a new direction.This year’s big rebrand was so skillfully executed that many people I ran into here at Sundance didn’t even know it had happened at all. If they had, we might have gotten a mob scene at one of the typically sedate short-film showcases, where an 18-minute project called “The Heart” premiered from a fledgling filmmaker credited as Malia Ann, though she’s much better known as Malia Obama, the daughter of the former president.Now 25, Obama is no Hollywood neophyte: After interning at the Weinstein Company in 2017, she studied filmmaking at Harvard as a visual and environmental studies major and then, upon graduation, wrote for the Amazon series “Swarm.” That show was cocreated by Donald Glover, who also served as executive producer of “The Heart” and has been helping to steer Obama’s nascent career: “The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once,” Glover told GQ last year. “You’re Obama’s daughter. So if you make a bad film, it will follow you around.”That’s not a fate likely to befall “The Heart,” a well-shot and spare debut. Effectively a two-hander, the short stars singer-actor Tunde Adebimpe as Joshua, a sensitive man who still lives with his mother (LaTonya Borsay). After they have a passive-aggressive fight about the groceries and share a silent, side-by-side TV dinner, Joshua goes upstairs for a shower. Minutes later, his mother clutches her chest, collapses to the floor and dies alone.Tunde Adebimpe in a scene from “The Heart.”Sundance InstituteRacked with guilt, Joshua finds it hard to move on, not least because he must now carry around a jar containing his mother’s preserved heart, as per her will. But he gets a second chance of sorts when he encounters a stranger on the street who looks just like his departed mother. Determined to say the things he never got to tell her when she was alive, Joshua ultimately learns that maybe he should go a little bit easier on himself.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?  More

It’s been delightful reading your emails about favorite stops, and seeing the state’s highways and landmarks through your eyes.The Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael.Marlena Sloss for The New York TimesDriving to Davis from the Bay Area on Interstate 80 last week, I spotted a cow jumping over the moon.More specifically, I saw the longstanding sign for the old Milk Farm restaurant in Dixon, which I’ve now learned, after poring over readers’ submissions about iconic roadside attractions, is a landmark for many travelers in the Sacramento area. Seeing it in person made me feel as if I was getting a peek into a whole new side of California that I had yet to explore.I wrote last week about popular roadside sights, like Pea Soup Andersen’s or the Harris Ranch, that can feel so personal to Californians, reminding us of old commutes or family road trips of long ago. It’s been a pleasure to read the emails you have sent in response, and to see the state’s highways and landmarks through your eyes.On that same trip to Davis, I pulled over at Ikeda’s, following the suggestion of one reader, David Hayashida, who wrote that the country market was his go-to stop when traveling from Greenbrae, where he lives, to Sacramento. He recommended the crumbly Dutch apple pie, and it did not disappoint.Here are some more suggestions that readers have sent, lightly edited:“A favorite landmark memory for our family is of the color-changing lighted pylons at the LAX gateway. Driving down Sepulveda Boulevard back when our sons were young, we would look ahead to the pylons and make a guessing game of what color combination the columns would be in by the time our car reached them.” — Kathy Tyrer, Santa Barbara“Whenever we are out exploring California on road trips and heading home, we are always thrilled to see the beautiful Placer County courthouse right by I-80 that signals we are almost home.” — Jan Foster, AuburnWe 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?  More

Policymakers view the reporting of an on-time pattern as a way to reduce disparities in homeownership.About a third of American households rent, yet in most cases their credit score doesn’t reflect their on-time payments.That’s beginning to change. Renters can increasingly choose to have their timely monthly payments reported to the credit bureaus, with the goal of improving their credit profile to qualify for loans.A bevy of third-party services now offer consumers the option of having their on-time rent payments reported to one or more credit bureaus. The bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — can add rent payments to loan data to enhance the credit reports and credit scores that lenders use to evaluate potential borrowers.The services typically report only on-time payments, but consumer experts recommend checking the details first. The reporting of late payments, such as when tenants withhold rent to protest their living conditions, may be a drawback to enrolling, consumer experts say.Zillow, the real estate website, became the latest entrant in the rent-reporting market this month. Some options, like Zillow’s, are available to renters whose landlords or property managers use the company’s rental management system to process payments. Others, like the service offered by Self Financial, are available directly to renters.As it stands, few landlords routinely report rent payments to credit bureaus. Traditionally, only lenders have reported to the bureaus, and rent isn’t considered a loan. Fewer than 5 percent of the roughly 80 million adults who live in rental housing had rental data in their credit files, and it was mostly negative data from missed payments, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group focused on advancing upward mobility and equity. (Negative rent information can end up in credit files if a landlord reports delinquent accounts or sends them to a collection agency.)But in recent years, policymakers have been exploring whether consumers can benefit from having on-time rent payments included in credit scores, just as payments for mortgages, car loans and credit cards are. Reporting on-time rent payments is viewed as a way to reduce disparities in homeownership.Fannie Mae, the quasi-governmental home finance giant, began a pilot program in 2022 using three financial technology companies that report on-time payments from thousands of renters in multifamily buildings to the credit bureaus. Fannie Mae reported in November that its data “shows a trajectory toward better financial health for many renters.” Well over half the participants increased their credit scores. Those who already had a credit score, and saw an improvement, had an average increase of about 40 points. (Scores range from 300 to 850.) The pilot has been extended to the end of this year.TransUnion has been able to include rent payments in its credit reports since 2016 and has seen increasing interest from property managers, said Maitri Johnson, vice president of tenant and employment screening at the credit bureau. The company’s data show that rent reporting is particularly helpful to consumers who were “unscorable,” meaning they had no or little credit history, Ms. Johnson said.Ariel Nelson, a staff attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said consumers should be cautious. Reporting on-time payments can make sense, she said, for people who are able to consistently pay on time and may be renting temporarily while saving to buy a home.But there can be risks, particularly for lower income tenants who may struggle to pay on time, she added. If a tenant opts into reporting and pays on time for several months but then hits a rough patch and falls behind, the late payment isn’t reported. But lenders might interpret the absence of rental information on the credit report for a month or two as a negative, Ms. Nelson said.(Fannie Mae said that separate from the pilot, lenders could use its automated underwriting system to supplement their credit evaluations of first-time home buyers by including rent data, and that missing rent payments weren’t counted against the borrower.)The general industry approach so far is to give renters a choice about whether to have their payments regularly reported, and to report only on-time payments.As the practice becomes more widespread, landlords could eventually require reporting of rent to credit bureaus, Ms. Johnson said. The requirement would probably be disclosed during the negotiation of the lease agreement.The reporting of negative information could affect tenants who might want to withhold rent as a way to force landlords to maintain or repair buildings, Ms. Nelson said. If landlords report the withheld payments, tenants may feel pressured to pay to avoid harming their credit. A recent news report suggested that has happened in New York City.Zillow’s service deems payments on time if they are received within 30 days of the due date, said Amy Wipfler, senior product manager for social impact at the company. Payments made after that aren’t reported. The new service is available to “tens of thousands” of renters, she said.Currently, Zillow’s service reports just to Experian. If a participant applies for a loan with a lender that uses one of the other credit bureaus, the positive rent payments won’t have an impact. Zillow aims to add the other credit bureaus, Ms. Wipfler said. (Other services, like Esusu and Self Financial, report to all three.)Here are some questions and answers about using rent payments to help credit scores:Are all credit scoring systems able to factor in rent payments?No. Only the latest, but not yet widespread, versions of credit scoring systems from FICO, the data analytics company, can incorporate rent data, said Ethan Dornhelm, the company’s vice president for scores and predictive analytics. The FICO 8 version, an older but widely used model, cannot factor in rents, he said. All versions of VantageScore, a scoring model owned by the major credit bureaus, are able to factor in rent payments, a spokeswoman, Sarah Cain, said in an email.Is there a charge for rent reporting services?That varies. Some services are free for both landlords and tenants, while others may charge one-time or monthly fees. (Some are free for new rental payments but charge for reporting prior rental history.) It may not be worthwhile for consumers who already have top-tier credit scores to have their rent reported, since they would probably see incremental benefits from an even higher score, Ms. Johnson at TransUnion said.What are other ways to build credit?Options for building credit if you have a scant credit file or marred credit include opening a “secured” credit card. You typically make a deposit and get a line of credit up to that amount, and your payment history is reported to the credit bureaus. Some community banks and credit unions offer “credit builder” loans. The money you borrow is held in a bank account while you make payments, which are reported to credit bureaus. Once you have paid the loan amount, you get access to the funds. More

Many consider the moves a sign of a succession plan at the nation’s largest bank, although the stalwart Mr. Dimon has signaled he’s not going anywhere.JPMorgan Chase is reshuffling its leadership team, a move that many consider a succession plan even though its longtime chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has signaled he’s staying put.Mr. Dimon, 67, has been head of what is now the largest bank in the United States for nearly two decades, and repeatedly brushed off suggestions that he might step aside. The specter of his eventual departure, however, hangs over JPMorgan as outsiders question whether he might run for public office or serve in a presidential administration.In a memo to employees Thursday, JPMorgan muddied the matter further. It said that Daniel Pinto, the bank’s chief operating officer and Mr. Dimon’s deputy, would no longer handle the bank’s daily operations. Mr. Dimon said that he and Mr. Pinto would “continue to jointly manage the company.”Mr. Pinto’s former responsibilities will be split by Jennifer Piepszak and Troy Rohrbaugh, who will serve as co-chief executives of an expanded commercial and investment bank that brings several lines of the company into one unit. Ms. Piepszak, who co-heads JPMorgan’s massive consumer banking business, has long been seen as a potential candidate for the top job. Mr. Rohrbaugh had been one of the co-heads of the bank’s markets and securities business.The reshuffle will result in the departure of some executives. Others at the bank will see their roles redefined or be promoted to new ones.Another senior executive, Marianne Lake, who ran the consumer and community banking unit with Ms. Piepszak, will now become the sole head of that business. Wall Street analysts have long considered Ms. Lake as a potential successor to Mr. Dimon as well.Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management business and is perhaps the bank’s most public face after Mr. Dimon, will remain in her current role.Mr. Dimon has a financial incentive to stay in his post a good deal longer. In addition to his annual pay ($36 million in 2023), he is slated to receive an additional bonus if he’s still chief executive in 2026. More

A sequence of atmospheric rivers will bring heavy rainfall and snow to the Western U.S. and Canada over the next week.The Western United States and Canada are likely to see excessive rain and heavy snowfall from a sequence of back-to-back atmospheric rivers beginning this weekend and continuing into next week.An atmospheric river is like a powerful fire hose with only one person holding it. It often has a narrow path of the heaviest and strongest precipitation. It can be challenging to pinpoint where the heaviest stream of water will fall. It could be strong in the San Francisco Bay Area, and little might fall in Southern California, or vice versa.This early in the forecast, meteorologists are certain that the weather pattern is set up for a series of atmospheric river events — in some locations likely reaching a three or a four on the Atmospheric River five-point scale developed by the SCRIPPS Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego — along the West Coast. But they are less certain where the heaviest precipitation will fall, especially later in the week. There are at least three atmospheric rivers over the next week, and an additional one beyond that. More

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(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;

AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;

(2) By fifteen votes to two,

The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke;

AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;

(3) By sixteen votes to one,

The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke;

AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde;

(4) By sixteen votes to one,

The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke;

AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; More