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A Russian deputy defense minister has been arrested on charges of accepting a “large-scale” bribe, the country's top law enforcement investigators announced Tuesday.The investigative committee's brief announcement revealed few details about what led to the detention of Timur Ivanov, the deputy minister. But the legal statute he is accused of violating involves accepting bribes “on a particularly large scale,” more than a million rubles, or more than $10,000.The Ministry of Defense did not comment on the investigation.Ivanov, deputy defense minister since 2016, has long been responsible for military construction projects, including most recently the huge contracts awarded to rebuild the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, which was devastated by Russian attacks so...

Lori and George Schappell, conjoined twins whose skulls were partially fused but who managed to lead independent lives, died April 7 in Philadelphia. There were 62 of them.Their deaths, which occurred in hospital, were announced by a funeral home, which cited no cause.Dr. Christopher Moir, a professor of surgery at the Mayo Clinic, who was part of teams that separated six pairs of conjoined twins - although none of them were joined at the head - said that when one of the Schappells died, the other would have to almost certainly followed quickly.“Conjoined twins share circulation,” he said, “so unless you somehow emergently split their connection, it's absolutely a fatal process and not viable.”The Schappells lived much longer than expected when they were born as craniopagus twins, joi...

At least five people, including a young girl, died at sea off the coast of northern France on Tuesday during an attempt to cross the Channel, French authorities said, as governments on both sides of the waterway struggle to dissuade the migrants from making the journey. dangerous trip to Great Britain.According to French authorities, the deceased were on board a heavily overloaded dinghy with more than 100 people. The boat was one of several vessels spotted by the French coast guard near the town of Wimereux on Tuesday morning.The deaths came just hours after Britain's Parliament passed highly controversial legislation to allow the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, a measure that British authorities have presented as a way to dissuade people from attempting the dangerous Chann...

The idea triggered a full-scale revolt on the Google campus.Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small, $9 million contract to put the skills of a few of its most innovative developers to the task of building an artificial intelligence tool that would help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield using drone footage.Engineers and other Google employees argued that the company should have nothing to do with Project Maven, even if it was designed to help the military discern between civilians and militants.The uproar forced the company to back out, but Project Maven didn’t die — it just moved to other contractors. Now, it has grown into an ambitious experiment being tested on the front lines in Ukraine, forming a key component of the U.S. military’s effort to funn...

“Everyone risks their lives for a bag of flour,” he recalled. In those moments, he said, he felt as if he were doomed to be crushed under the wheels of trucks or killed by Israeli forces.At one point during the winter, Mr. Barda said he managed to get two bags of flour from a convoy. Then someone threatened him, saying that if he did not give up one, the stranger would take them both by force.In February, Mr. Barda was dashing to get a sack of flour from a United Nations truck when he collided with another man who was cutting the ropes holding the aid. In the chaos, the blade cut off Mr. Barda's finger, splattering his prize with blood. But it was a beautiful day. His family managed to make the 25 kilogram bag last for two months.Before the war, Mr. Barda worked as a baker in a ch...

Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist who was part of the original team that helped fight the Ebola virus in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at age 87.His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who said his father died of complications from kidney cancer.“We were scared to death,” Dr. Breman, recalling his pioneering mission, told a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola epidemic raged that year.Nearly 40 years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were faced with an unnamed viral infection, the origin of which was unknown, and which was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that led to a ...

Britain's Conservative government finally won approval for its flagship immigration policy on Monday, enshrining a deportation bill to Rwanda that human rights activists say is inhumane, immigration experts say unworkable and legal critics say it has corroded the country's reputation in terms of the rule of law.The legislation is designed to allow the government to put some asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, where their claims will be processed by authorities in that central African country. If they were then granted refugee status, they would be resettled in Rwanda, not Britain.From the moment the plan was first introduced in 2022, under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, experts said it would breach Britain's human rights obligations under national and internationa...

European Union regulators on Monday threatened to fine TikTok over potentially addictive features on a version of its app called TikTok Lite, which was released to run more smoothly on slower wireless networks.The EU investigation adds to TikTok's regulatory challenges as the US Senate prepares to vote on a bill that would order the app's owner, Chinese internet company ByteDance, to sell TikTok or be banned. The company is under increasing pressure due to its ties to China, data collection practices and potentially harmful effects on children.In Europe, authorities said TikTok had not conducted a legally required risk assessment before introducing features that let users earn rewards such as gift cards for watching videos, liking content and following certain creators. They said...

Israel has provided no evidence to support its allegations that many employees of the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees are members of terrorist organizations, according to an independent study commissioned by the United Nations and published on Monday.The review did not address Israel's allegations that a dozen employees of the agency, known as UNRWA, were involved in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on October 7. “It is a separate mission and does not fall within our mandate.” said Catherine Colonna, the former French foreign minister who led the investigation.The review was announced in January, before Israel released claims that one in 10 of UNRWA's 13,000 employees in the Gaza Strip were members of Hamas or its ally, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that some of those...

Nei suoi tre decenni di lavoro con gli elefanti marini, la dottoressa Marcela Uhart non aveva mai visto nulla di simile sulla scena avvenuta lo scorso ottobre sulle spiagge della penisola argentina di Valdés.Era l'alta stagione riproduttiva; la spiaggia avrebbe dovuto pullulare di harem di femmine fertili e di maschi enormi in lotta tra loro per il dominio. Si trattava invece di “carcasse su carcasse su carcasse”, ha ricordato il dottor Uhart, che dirige il programma sanitario per la fauna selvatica dell’America Latina presso l’Università della California, a Davis.L'H5N1, uno dei tanti virus che causano l'influenza aviaria, aveva già ucciso almeno 24.000 leoni marini sudamericani lungo le coste del continente in meno di un anno. Ora era arrivato per gli elefanti marini.I cuc...