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      U.S. Says Deadly Blast in Yemen Was Caused by Houthi Missile

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      An explosion near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital on Sunday killed 12 people, according to health authorities tied to the Houthi-led government.A deadly blast on Sunday near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital was caused by a Houthi missile, not a U.S. airstrike, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said on Thursday.The health ministry of the Houthi-led government said earlier this week that an American airstrike had hit a densely populated neighborhood of Sana, the Yemeni capital, killing 12 people and injuring 30 others. The blast struck an area adjacent to Sana’s Old City, a UNESCO world heritage site filled with ancient towers.Dave Eastburn, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that while the damage and casualties described by local health officials most “likely did occur,” they were not the result of an American attack. While the United States had conducted military operations over Sana that night, the closest American strike was more than three miles away, he added.The Pentagon’s assessment that the damage was caused by a “Houthi Air Defense missile” was based in part on a review of “local reporting, including videos documenting Arabic writing on the missile’s fragments at the market,” Mr. Eastburn said. The Pentagon did not provide those videos or evidence of its claims in its statements.An initial review by The New York Times of local reporting and open-source material in Yemen found a video showing a missile fragment with Arabic writing posted to social media, however it was from a different location from the market in Sana’s Old City. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ Politburo, said in a phone interview that the American denial was an attempt to smear the Houthis. He reiterated that the group believed that the United States targeted the neighborhood on Sunday, “just as it previously targeted ports, cemeteries and citizens’ homes, resulting in the deaths of hundreds.”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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      D.N.C. Leader Moves to Rein In Deputy Who Went Rogue on Primary Challenges

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      Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, criticized a vice chair of the party, David Hogg, over his controversial plan to challenge Democratic incumbents.A brewing weeklong fight inside the Democratic National Committee burst into the open on Thursday as the party’s chairman, Ken Martin, rebuked one of his vice chairs and moved to stop him from intervening in Democratic primary races while serving as a top party official.The vice chair, David Hogg, 25, had announced last week that he planned to spend money in Democratic primaries through his outside group, Leaders We Deserve, and that he hoped to raise $20 million for the effort.That set off a storm of criticism from Democrats angry at the idea that a top party official would be putting his finger on the scale in primary contests. On Thursday, Mr. Martin responded publicly for the first time, declaring, “No D.N.C. officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary.”Mr. Martin said he had “great respect” for Mr. Hogg and understood his goals, yet he issued what amounted to an ultimatum: Mr. Hogg was “more than free” to fund primary challenges, just not as an officer of the D.N.C.Mr. Martin made his comments on a call with reporters announcing plans to expand grants to the party’s operations in red states.At a private meeting last month, all of the committee’s officers — except Mr. Hogg — signed a pledge promising to remain neutral in primary races.Mr. Hogg has done a blitz in the news media, appearing on cable shows to make his case after The New York Times first reported his plans, which he stipulated would be limited to races for safe Democratic seats. Mr. Hogg said his goal was to elect a younger generation of Democrats and replace older incumbents he saw as less effective. Still, as he faced blowback on Capitol Hill, his group donated $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said Mr. Martin would introduce a series of previously planned party changes that would include putting neutrality in the bylaws — meaning Mr. Hogg could not serve in his position if he were still pursuing his plan.The package will go before the party’s membership in August, she said.Ms. Kleeb said the importance of party neutrality was made clear during the divisive 2016 primary race between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, when party leaders supported Mrs. Clinton.“David got elected to be a D.N.C. officer,” Ms. Kleeb said of Mr. Hogg’s vice-chair post. “He did not get elected to primary Democrats.”Ms. Kleeb said she had spoken with Mr. Hogg privately and told him that he could remain a part of D.N.C. leadership if he walled himself off from his outside group’s endorsement decisions, as some union leaders have done.”He can’t have both,” she said. “He has to make a decision.”Mr. Hogg did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Should We Start Taking the Welfare of A.I. Seriously?

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      As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.One of my most deeply held values as a tech columnist is humanism. I believe in humans, and I think that technology should help people, rather than disempower or replace them. I care about aligning artificial intelligence — that is, making sure that A.I. systems act in accordance with human values — because I think our values are fundamentally good, or at least better than the values a robot could come up with.So when I heard that researchers at Anthropic, the A.I. company that made the Claude chatbot, were starting to study “model welfare” — the idea that A.I. models might soon become conscious and deserve some kind of moral status — the humanist in me thought: Who cares about the chatbots? Aren’t we supposed to be worried about A.I. mistreating us, not us mistreating it?It’s hard to argue that today’s A.I. systems are conscious. Sure, large language models have been trained to talk like humans, and some of them are extremely impressive. But can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights? Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close.But I was intrigued. After all, more people are beginning to treat A.I. systems as if they are conscious — falling in love with them, using them as therapists and soliciting their advice. The smartest A.I. systems are surpassing humans in some domains. Is there any threshold at which an A.I. would start to deserve, if not human-level rights, at least the same moral consideration we give to animals?Consciousness has long been a taboo subject within the world of serious A.I. research, where people are wary of anthropomorphizing A.I. systems for fear of seeming like cranks. (Everyone remembers what happened to Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee who was fired in 2022, after claiming that the company’s LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.)But that may be starting to change. There is a small body of academic research on A.I. model welfare, and a modest but growing number of experts in fields like philosophy and neuroscience are taking the prospect of A.I. consciousness more seriously, as A.I. systems grow more intelligent. Recently, the tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel compared A.I. welfare to animal welfare, saying he believed it was important to make sure “the digital equivalent of factory farming” doesn’t happen to future A.I. beings.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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      A Paris Hotel With Rooftop Views and a Rock-Climbing Wall

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      Plus: an architectural travel guide, dishes that pay homage to Henri Matisse and more recommendations.Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Stay HereIn Paris, a Hotel That Mixes Past and PresentLeft: La Fondation’s fine-dining restaurant on the eighth floor of the hotel. Right: the bedrooms are clad in oak paneling with blue feature walls inspired by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s influence on fashion.Paris’s 17th Arrondissement, near the city’s northwestern limits, is mostly residential, so it’s not typically front of mind for visitors to the French capital. But the opening of La Fondation, a 58-room hotel with interiors by the New York-based design firm Roman and Williams, might shift that mind-set. It’s part of a new 10-story complex that also includes an office space with rooftop gardens, a gym — which features a rock-climbing wall, 80-foot-long pool and multiple fitness rooms — and a spa with saunas, a hammam and treatment rooms. Hotel guests get access to all of this, along with two French restaurants — a classic bistro and a fine-dining option, both helmed by the local chef Thomas Rossi — and a rooftop bar that offers sweeping views spanning from the Sacre Coeur to the Eiffel Tower. For the hotel décor, Roman and Williams referenced the city’s late Modernist period: rooms feature color-blocked walls bordered by oak frames — a nod to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dress. In the common areas, large-scale commissions such as a wooden wall sculpture by the Croatian artisan Vedran Jakšić or the painted ceramic tiles by French artist Pierre Yves Canard, merge with the architecture. “There’s a constant interplay between refinement and rawness, fashion and function, Paris then and now,” says Robin Standefer, a co-founder of Roman and Williams. La Fondation opens April 28; from $440 a night, en.lafondationhotel.com.Read ThisA Pocket-Size Guide to Modernist Buildings Around the World“Modernist Travel Guide,” Adam Štěch’s new book published by Sight Unseen, spotlights an international trove of buildings, including the architect Otto Kolb’s villa in Zurich.Adam ŠtěchThe Prague-based design historian and photographer Adam Štěch had an early fascination with marine biology. “My role model was [the French oceanographer] Jacques Cousteau,” he says. “I wanted to be an explorer.” Štěch, who later developed a keen interest in architecture, has visited nearly 50 countries, documenting notable 20th-century buildings and forgotten ones too. As a result, he often fields inquiries from friends bound for Honolulu or Paris or Mexico City. “What should I see?” goes the familiar refrain. “Tell me some hidden Modernist gems.” Now — thanks to the online magazine and first-time book publisher Sight Unseen, with support from the Swiss company USM Modular Furniture — these answers arrive in pocket-size book form. “Modernist Travel Guide” is a tour of 30 international cities, each with a dozen or so highlights. Some, like the psychedelic Pannenhuis Metro Station in Brussels or Arne Jacobsen’s canopied gas station outside Copenhagen, are open to the public. Others, like the Berlin example of Le Corbusier’s colorful Unité d’Habitation buildings, can only be admired from the street. The book’s breadth — a Madrid optics institute, a Los Angeles deli, a little-known London storefront designed by the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius — prompts an offbeat scavenger hunt, wherever you might wind up. “Modernist Travel Guide” will be available May 8; $38, shop.sightunseen.com.See ThisIn New York’s Chelsea, an Exhibition and a Restaurant Dedicated to the Painter Teruko YokoiLeft: Teruko Yokoi in her studio at Hotel Chelsea in 1959. Right: Yokoi’s “Autumn Day” (1983).Left: Charles Gimpel, courtesy of the Estate of Teruko Yokoi. Right: © Estate of Teruko Yokoi; courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New YorkThe Japanese Swiss artist Teruko Yokoi lived and worked in New York’s Hotel Chelsea for three productive years until she moved out in 1961. She never returned, says her daughter, Kayo, who has managed her estate since her death in 2020. But next month, the abstract painter and collage artist will have a homecoming of sorts with the opening of a Japanese restaurant named after her and an exhibition at the nearby Hollis Taggart gallery. The restaurant, in the hotel’s cellar, will serve simple Japanese dishes (plated on the chef Tadashi Ono’s own ceramics) across a 12-seat sushi bar and dining room, with a cocktail area specializing in Japanese whiskies. Guests can access it from inside the lobby or, through an exterior staircase tucked between the hotel’s main entrance and a longstanding guitar shop that leads into a small, subterranean garden passageway. Nine of Yokoi’s paintings from throughout her career will be on display and, a few blocks over, 25 others will comprise a gallery survey co-curated by her grandson, Tai, who also oversees her estate. Titled “Noh Theater,” it draws parallels between that traditional form of Japanese performance and the artist’s work. Both often employ tea paper (the former for its programs) and are characterized by “slow, deliberate and symbolic movements,” as Tai writes in an accompanying essay. Kayo says her mother had a history of showing her work beyond galleries: After relocating her family to Switzerland following the dissolution of her marriage to the painter Sam Francis, Yokoi exhibited her work in public spaces like restaurants and hospitals. “She wanted to bring beauty and create a refuge from this tumultuous world,” Kayo says. “I think she would be very happy about this.” The restaurant Teruko will open in mid-May; “Noh Theater” is on view from May 1 through Jun. 14, hollistaggart.com.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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      Review: As New York’s Opera Scene Empties, Another Rises Upstate

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      R.B. Schlather’s vibrant staging of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” playing in the Hudson Valley, is a bright spot in a bleak landscape for Baroque work.New York City Opera had recently shuttered when the director R.B. Schlather started to present Handel operas in a white-box gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan about 10 years ago. Those spare, surreal stagings of “Alcina” and “Orlando” felt like an elegy for City Opera’s innovative productions, and for its devotion to Handel — most famously, a landmark 1960s “Giulio Cesare” starring Beverly Sills.Now, as Schlather’s vibrant vision for “Giulio Cesare” plays at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., the landscape for opera — especially Baroque opera — is even bleaker in New York City, two hours south by train.The Metropolitan Opera, whose 4,000-seat theater isn’t a natural fit for early music, does less than it used to, and it’s become more or less the only game in town. City Opera was revived in name, but as a wan shadow of its former self. The Brooklyn Academy of Music used to be a destination for revelatory Baroque stagings by the likes of Les Arts Florissants; no more. Lincoln Center, ditto. Carnegie Hall presents Harry Bicket’s English Concert in a single Handel performance a year — on May 4 it’s, yes, “Cesare” — but unstaged, in concert.Upstate, Schlather has been unfurling a series of Handel productions with the terrific period-instrument ensemble Ruckus; “Cesare,” running through May 2, comes on the heels of “Rodelinda” at Hudson Hall in 2023. It is a precious bastion of an ever rarer breed.His directorial style in dealing with this composer’s works has gotten clearer with experience. “Alcina” and “Orlando” were always quirky, often thrilling and sometimes bewildering. But this substantially yet intelligently trimmed “Cesare” — with intermission, it’s just under three hours — is a stylishly straightforward account of a story of vengeance and lust set amid Julius Caesar’s campaign to conquer both Egypt and Cleopatra. Hudson Hall has a proscenium, but Schlather’s set pushes the action downstage in front of it with two angled walls painted iridescent black. Under Masha Tsimring’s stark, shadow-throwing lighting, those walls twinkle like a starry sky.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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      They Caught the Flu, and Never Came Home

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      The virus leads to an estimated 36,000 deaths in the United States each season — many of them so sudden that families are left reeling.Lauren Caggiano had felt sick for days by the time she tested positive for the flu in an emergency room on a February afternoon. Hours later, she was in the intensive care unit. By 4 in the morning, she was on a ventilator.Ms. Caggiano, a paralegal who lived in Oceanside, Calif., doted on her two dogs and had recently become a grandmother, died two days later. She was 49.“You don’t really think, if you’re in decent health, that’s going to be what gets you,” her son, Brandon Salgado, said.Many people recover from a bout of flu within a few days or a week. But every year, the virus still kills more than 36,000 people across the United States and sends hundreds of thousands to the hospital. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that this flu season has been especially severe.Some of those who died were at greater risk for getting seriously ill because of underlying conditions or their age. Others, like Ms. Caggiano, were otherwise healthy before their infections. Some had not received the flu shot, which reduces but does not eliminate the risk of death. Some were hospitalized for weeks; others felt ill for only days before they died.All of their deaths came as a shock to the people who knew them.A Swift DeclinePart of what stunned Mr. Salgado was just how quickly his mother died.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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      ‘Hold Me in the Water’ Review: Smitten, and Primed to Flirt

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      Ryan J. Haddad follows up his Obie-winning “Dark Disabled Stories” with a rom-com.In a lake off a beach, on a sun-warmed afternoon somewhere in upstate New York, Cupid was practicing his archery. An arrow, when it flew, pierced a young man’s torso, lodging firmly in his heart.Now, technically, there is no mention of the Roman god of love in “Hold Me in the Water,” the deliciously funny romantic comedy from the playwright-actor Ryan J. Haddad, but there doesn’t need to be. Watching his solo performance at Playwrights Horizons, we sense that arrow strike just as surely as if we’d been there with him, the summer he was 26 and taking a dip with his hot new crush.“This boy who’s holding both of my hands and facing me … Well, he never let go,” Haddad tells us in this slender memoir of a show, in which he plays a version of himself called Ryan. “Not for the entire hour. He held me in that water.” Then, lightly, he adds the crucial fact: “He made me feel safe.”Haddad, who has cerebral palsy, means physically safe; a lake, with its uncertain footing, poses dangers for him. But this attractive acquaintance, whom he has just met at an artists’ residency, seems to understand intuitively what his body needs. The day before, when an already interested Ryan asked for assistance up the steps into a bookshop, the guy (whose identity he blurs: no name, few particulars) knew exactly how to help, as if he had been doing it for years.“No questions had to be asked,” Haddad says. “No mishaps. The trust between our bodies — my hand, his hand — was magnetic and instinctual.”Swoon.Thus begins an exhilarating infatuation, physical trust leading quickly to emotional investment, along with palpable chemistry. But this is a rom-com, so there must be obstacles, separations, mixed signals — and agonizing over all of it, which Ryan does once he is back home in Manhattan.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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      Overlooked Clue Sheds Light on Shakespeare’s Marriage

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      New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband to his wife, Anne.Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind to lead a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had famously bequeathed her his “second best bed” in his will.But Mr. Steggle’s new research, expected to be published this week in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.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