The New York Times

Blade, the helicopter charter company, was founded 10 years ago as a way for commuters going between New York and the Hamptons to avoid vehicle traffic.

A Boeing 767 plane flown by Delta Air Lines lost an emergency slide on Friday, prompting it to return to New York not long after taking off, officials said.

In the 16th century, Antwerp, Belgium, with its busy docks along the river Scheldt, was a booming center of trade and one of Europe’s most influential cities, attracting artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs. In 1576, Christophe Plantin ran a prestigious printing business (one of the continent’s largest) in the center of the city, a half-mile from where, a few decades later, the painter Peter Paul Rubens would build his own studio and semicircular sculpture hall, modeled after the Pantheon. Over the years, while other long-established port cities like Venice and Barcelona evolved into throbbing tourist centers, Belgium’s second city largely kept far away from the spotlight, yet it’s always quietly maintained a reputation as a place for innovation and creative expression. In the 1980s, it became an important fashion hub with the emergence of the Antwerp Six: a group of young designers, including Ann Demeulemeester, who had been educated at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Pulling into the Santa Lucia train station in Venice on Thursday morning, passengers were told via an overhead announcement that they might have to pay a 5-euro fee to enter the city’s historic center. Failure to pay could result in a fine from 50 to 300 euros, the announcement said.

Next month, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, the co-founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio In Common With, plan to open Quarters, a shop housed in a 19th-century TriBeCa loft. The 8,000-square-foot space is laid out like a well-appointed home: Guests enter through the library and can wander the great room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bar and lounge at their leisure. Everything within — furniture, lighting, art and even the pantry provisions — is available for purchase. Ozemba and Hung collaborated with several of their creative friends on the objects and décor that fill the space. They designed the tiling throughout with the New York City-based artist Shane Gabler, while a fresco depicting eels with earrings by the painter Claudio Bonuglia adorns a portion of the bar and lounge, which will open for evening service beginning this summer. The furniture on display is a mix of restored vintage pieces and new designs by Ozemba and Hung, some of which can be customized with imagery drawn up by various tattoo artists. “We’ll be able to sit down with people and play,” Ozemba says of the space’s potential to spur conversation and inspire new projects. “Retail shouldn’t be so serious. Take off your shoes and have a glass of wine.”

Southwest Airlines is ceasing operations at four airports, and reducing flights from others, in an effort to cut costs after its growth plans were curtailed by fewer than expected plane deliveries from Boeing.

On Oct. 3, 2022, I reserved a seat in a Megabus coach for the busy Sunday after Thanksgiving to return to Boston after visiting family in Philadelphia. With a $3.99 booking fee, the total came to $53.98. On Oct. 26, I received an email from Megabus canceling the trip “due to a schedule alteration,” and promising a refund. But I only received $49.99. I wrote every few months demanding my $3.99 back, receiving no response until nearly a year later, when an agent named Danielle wrote back to explain that the service fee was nonrefundable. I understand why a company would keep a fee if I had canceled or rebooked, but this was their decision. Can you help?

After years of debate, Venice on Thursday will begin charging day visitors five euros to visit its fragile historic center on peak days, making it the first city in the world to adopt such a measure to counter overtourism.

The Transportation Department on Wednesday announced new rules taking aim at two of the most difficult and annoying issues in air travel: obtaining refunds and encountering surprise fees late in the booking process.

Two framed documents from a long career at Boeing hang side by side in Merle Meyers’s home: A certificate from 2022 that thanks him for three decades of service. And a letter he received months later reprimanding him for his performance.

The stone arches looped solemnly over their shadows, some teetering above the grass, some sinking into it. It was a dazzling January morning, and I was standing in the Park of the Aqueducts, about 20 minutes by metro from central Rome. Here, the ruined arcades of six of the 11 aqueducts that once supplied the Eternal City with an astonishing volume of water — by some counts double the per capita water allotment of a typical 21st-century American city — have been preserved.

Sometime in the late 18th century, a sign appeared outside a shambly butcher’s hut in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon: “The Immortal Shakspeare was born in this house,” it announced, using a then common spelling of his name. Devotees began making pilgrimages — dropping to their knees, weeping, singing odes: “Untouched and sacred be thy shrine, Avonian Willy, bard Divine!”

East Austin | Wine bar

The Greek government on Friday published a list of 198 “untrodden beaches” that it said are now off limits to bars, restaurants and large public gatherings in its latest attempt to contain development and address the backlash to the throngs of tourists that descend on the country’s coastlines each year.

For his 73rd birthday in April, Felice Macchi had lunch at La Bettola Del Gusto, a restaurant in Pompeii, Italy, with a focus on seafood.

For many parents and guardians, putting a child on a flight alone may seem terrifying. Belligerent passengers, delays, turbulence: All loom large in a caregiver’s imagination.

I stepped off the platform at the gleaming new Maxcanú train station, eager to see the magnificent Maya archaeological site of Uxmal. All I needed was a taxi to take me there, a trip of about 30 miles away.

Hopie Stockman Hill and Grier Stockman grew up in an old farmhouse in a sylvan pocket of New Jersey. They played in wheat fields, craggy apple orchards and dense forests; built birdhouses and painted murals. The sisters’ childhood, spent merging art with nature, inspired their latest wallpaper collection from Block Shop, their textile, art and design studio, which combines a breezy California aesthetic with Indian printing and weaving techniques. The seven new patterns, which are printed on paper, fiber and grass cloth, include a peony motif that’s a homage to the blooms their mother grew, while also referencing the Austrian Wiener Werkstätte designer Dagobert Peche. “We envisioned an Anne Bancroft-esque grande dame with a sky-high collection of art books, listening to ‘Madama Butterfly’while harvesting her beets,” says Stockman Hill, the CEO and creative director of the studio. “These are the wallpapers you find in her home.” The Block Shop store, which opened in Los Angeles’s Atwater Village neighborhood this past December, further extends the sisters’ canvas with a harmonious blend of color and texture. A bronze snail door handle greets you on the way in, while the shelves are brimming with Apuglian splatterware dishes, rare books on décor and semi-fine jewelry, as well as the brand’s signature textiles.

Amsterdam has been searching for any way to rein in the number of tourists that visit the city every year.

Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, became something of a Margaret Mead in black leather, steering her Harley-Davidson deep into a biker culture and producing the 2001 book, “Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society,” died on March 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.

Accra is rich with stories, some of them only a few words long — Still Hustling; Work Hard and Dream Big; Short Ways Are Dangerous — and written in bold letters on the rear windows of tro tros, the ubiquitous minibuses that ferry residents and visitors around the city. These mantras are meant to represent the people who own the buses. But they also tell of life in Accra, and what it takes to make it in this vibrant city.