Social Responsibility

Mary Lou Retton, who became one of the most popular athletes in the country after winning the all-around women’s gymnastics competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, has pneumonia and is “fighting for her life” in the intensive care unit, her daughter said in a statement this week.Retton’s daughter McKenna Lane Kelley said on Instagram that her mother “is not able to breathe on her own” and that she had been in the intensive care unit for more than a week.Kelley did not share more specific information about her mother’s condition, though she said that her pneumonia was…

Three days into Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan’s warnings to the defense had become unmistakable.Judge Kaplan, who is presiding over the high-profile white-collar fraud case, repeatedly told Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers to stop repeating themselves. Over and over, he directed them to rephrase their questions. And with his frequent interruptions of their cross-examinations, Judge Kaplan kept Mr. Bankman-Fried’s legal team off balance, putting it on the defensive.“I just want to express my growing concern about the extent of the entirely unnecessary repetition, and I’ve given you a lot of latitude,” Judge Kaplan…

The brutal terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas is a tragedy, one that may change the course of the nation and the entire region.Israelis are reeling, in shock over the toll of people killed, wounded and taken hostage, and the world is mourning with them. The militants killed more than 800 Israelis in a series of coordinated rocket attacks and continued fighting. To the world’s horror, they attacked civilians — including older people, women and children — and took them hostage. More than 150 people remain captive in Gaza, in a further atrocity.The attack was a tragic and painful reminder…

In a move that could alter the dynamics of the 2024 election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Monday that he would continue his presidential run as an independent candidate, ending his long-shot pursuit of the Democratic nomination against an incumbent president.Speaking to a crowd of supporters outside the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Mr. Kennedy, a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories, said he represented “a populist movement that defies left-right division.”“The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil it for…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Israelis to brace themselves for a long and difficult war on Sunday, a day after Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, launched its largest surprise attacks in decades.Israel responded with huge strikes on cities in the blockaded Gaza Strip, destroying dozens of buildings, as Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel. So far, more than 1,100 people have been killed in Israel and Gaza, the authorities said, with the death toll expected to rise.Israelis have been left asking how their government, military and intelligence agencies appeared to be taken by surprise…

The thousands of young Israelis had spent the night dancing at an outdoor rave, many clad in tie-dye T-shirts and crop tops.They ended the night in a massacre.Just after dawn on Saturday, hundreds of Palestinian militants bulldozed their way through the barricades between Gaza and Israel, drove into scores of Israeli towns along the border and sped through the farmland where the rave was reaching its sunrise climax.The militants gunned down more than 100 ravers and abducted others, according to two senior Israeli officials, as they sprinted through the open fields. Video verified by The New York Times showed militants…

The most sweeping invasion of Israeli territory in decades, conducted by a Hamas force that had been widely seen as a ragtag collection of militants, has delivered a psychological shock to Israel so great that its very foundations are being questioned: its army, its intelligence services, its government and its capacity to control the millions of Palestinians in its midst.The war that began with a Hamas assault that has taken as many as 700 Israeli lives is not an existential struggle for the survival of the Israeli state itself, as were the 1948 war triggered by Israel’s foundation or the…

Nearly two decades ago, I tried to write a group biography about the senators whose offices happened to be on the second floor of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. The group included John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel. I got to know and study each of those senators during that long-ago-abandoned project.The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of…