A company, like the NYT, is going to do what gets them the most money with the minimal costs. I don't hold the NYT to any ethical standard because I don't think that they, like most companies, have one.
There was no benefit for them to publish this story in the UK and risk legal costs and action against them.
Erm, tracking cookies and IP addresses are two completely different things.
NYT filtering it out based on IP doesn't have anything to do with tracking users unless further technology was involved, which I haven't heard anything of.
Now if they had put a tracking cookie on each person's computer to see the other websites they were visitng then yeah, I'd have a problem with it. But filtering it out based upon IP is not only the most logical way to filter one country from your content, but it also doesn't have anything to do with tracking user's habits.