5 mins read

Home where astronaut Neil Armstrong’s boyhood dreams of flying took off is for sale

WAPAKONETA, Ohio | Inside Neil Armstrong’s boyhood home, at the top of a creaky stairway, sits his bedroom where he launched model airplanes out of the rear window to measure how far they’d fly. Hanging in the room now are autographed photos of astronauts who’ve visited the privately kept house to see where Armstrong’s first […]

2 mins read

New York Film Festival unveils lineup to main slate. James Gray opens and Ava DuVernay closes

NEW YORK | The New York Film Festival has unveiled the main slate of films to its 64th edition, including works from James Gray, Ava DuVernay and Tony Gilroy. Organizers for Film at Lincoln Center on Wednesday announced the 32 films selected for its prestigious main slate lineup, all of which will play at the […]

7 mins read

Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, charged with organizing the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur, is on trial

LAS VEGAS | The man who prosecutors say orchestrated the 1996 killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur is scheduled to go to trial Monday, almost 30 years after the fatal drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, faces a single count of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, […]

3 mins read

Blossom of snow: A starry symbol of the Alps makes an unusual addition to rock gardens

If you’re looking to plant a rare flower with a storied past that’s had a well-known song written about it, edelweiss will check all your boxes. My mother grew up in northeastern Italy, just over the Austrian border near the Alps, where edelweiss grow wild along steep rocky ledges. When I was a child, she […]

3 mins read

Music Review: Ariana Grande’s ‘Petal’ displays a pop star at her most restrained

NEW YORK | Gone is the big-belter Ariana Grande. On “Petal,” her eighth studio album and first full-length release since both the end of her “Wicked” run and 2024’s “Eternal Sunshine,” the pop powerhouse looks inward across 12 tracks of real restraint. Lead single “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” with its muted reception […]

8 mins read

Oystercatchers, known for sharp bills and beady eyes, are making a comeback thanks to conservation

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. | On a pristine Rhode Island beach teeming with noisy seabirds, a group of biologists armed with nets sneak up on a pair of American oystercatcher chicks. But just as they move in to capture them, one of the football-size birds, with bright-orange bills and long legs, scampers into a coastal salt […]

4 mins read

Ancient mummy DNA provides scientific evidence that colonization brought smallpox to the Americas

NEW YORK | Ancient mummy DNA recovered in Chile has yielded the firmest evidence yet that European colonization brought smallpox to the Americas. Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in human history before it was eradicated in 1980, largely thanks to vaccination. For centuries, the virus had killed about one-third of the people it […]

4 mins read

Music Review: Charli xcx remains one of pop’s great contrarians on ‘Music, Fashion, Film’

NEW YORK | When Charli xcx released the barely two-minute, glitched-out “Rock Music,” the first single from “Music, Fashion, Film,” she was almost immediately labeled a provocateur. The song, with its hyperpop affectations and cheeky, lyrical dedication to craft — “I think the dance floor is dead/So now we’re making rock music” — confused and […]

6 mins read

Dry, hot summers are putting Dutch dikes at risk and threatening German river trade

WADDINXVEEN, Netherlands | Jeroen Wouda and Dirk Boom walk slowly along a Dutch dike, prodding at the bone dry surface with metal rods and scanning the parched grass for patches of green that could give away the location of a leak. In a scene that brings to mind the fictional Dutch boy who heroically plugs […]