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Three German citizens believed to have collected sensitive naval data and obtained a high-powered laser on behalf of Chinese security services were arrested on Monday, prosecutors said, underscoring the fragile nature of the relationship between the two countries.A man identified as Thomas R., in accordance with German privacy regulations, acted as an “agent” for the Chinese Ministry of State Security and hired two others – a married couple identified as Herwig and Ina F. – who managed an engineering company in Düsseldorf, authorities said.The arrests come at a difficult time for the German government: Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently spent three days in China as the countries signed several bilateral trade deals, but Germany is also vigilant about the threat posed by China.“We are aware of...

Caroline Mullet, a sixth-grader at Issaquah High School near Seattle, went to her first homecoming dance last fall, a James Bond-themed party with blackjack tables attended by hundreds of girls dressed in dresses party.Weeks later, she and other students learned that a classmate was circulating fake nude images of girls who had attended the dance, sexually explicit images that he had fabricated using an artificial intelligence app designed to automatically "undress" girls. photos dressed as royalty. girls and women.Ms. Mullet, 15, alerted her father, Mark, a Democratic senator from Washington state. Although she was not among the girls in the photos, she asked if anything could be done to help her friends, who felt "extremely uncomfortable" that male classmates had seen simulated nude im...

Israel abandoned plans for a much larger counterattack against Iran after concerted diplomatic pressure from the United States and other foreign allies and because the brunt of an Iranian attack on Israeli soil had been thwarted, according to three senior Israeli officials.Israeli leaders had initially discussed bombing several military targets across Iran last week, including near Tehran, the Iranian capital, in retaliation for Iran's April 13 attack, said the officials, who spoke of the discussion in anonymity to describe the delicate discussions.Such a large and damaging attack would have been much harder for Iran to ignore, increasing the chances of a strong Iranian counterattack that could have brought the Middle East to the brink of a major regional conflict.Ultimately – after Pr...

When it came to housing, Susan Apel and Keith Irwin thought they had expertly planned for their future lives. They bought a four-bedroom house on five acres in Lebanon, N.H., 24 years ago, and "we made sure we paid off the mortgage before we retired," said Ms. Apel, 71.That way, the home equity they had built up — they estimate their home is now worth about $700,000 — would allow them to sell and downsize to smaller, more manageable neighborhoods when they needed to.That moment has arrived. Ms. Apel, a retired law professor, has difficulty climbing stairs. Mr. Irwin, 71, previously an account manager for a local company, is tired of yard work and snow shoveling, and finding workers to do those jobs instead has become difficult.“We're seeing the writing on the wall,” Ms. Apel said. ...

Wesselman-Pierce lived with her husband, Vince Pierce, and her two children. “I didn't want to lose our friendship, no matter what,” a tearful Wesselman-Pierce told Schulman in the film. “Many of the personalities that emerged were just fragments of myself.”At the end of the documentary, a brooding Pierce recalled a story he'd heard and, in turn, gave the film — and the expression — his name. Cod, he said, was once shipped in vats from Alaska to China, but the fish arrived soft and tasteless. Catfish were eventually added to the tanks to keep the cod healthy. “There are those people who are catfish in life,” he said. In his mind, his wife was one of them. “They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.”Life, he added, would be "boring and monotonous if ...

Terry Anderson, the American journalist who was the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released in 1991 by Islamic militants after more than six years of captivity, died Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, in Hudson Valley. . He was 76 years old.The cause was apparently complications from recent heart surgery, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.Mr. Anderson, Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, had just dropped off his tennis partner, an AP photographer, at his home after an early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when men armed with guns broke open the door. the door of his car and pushed him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car had tried to cut him off the day before as he was returning to work from lunch in his seaside apartment.The...

In the age of Ozempic, “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith inspires and infuriates her followers.

All it took for the biscuit to take shape was a baker looking for a diversion, his tried-and-true croissant recipe and a few biscuits for inspiration. It took TikTok to make it viral.Stéphane Louvard created the cookie almost a year and a half ago when he came up with the idea of ​​putting cookie dough into a croissant and then baking it again. But demand for his cookies has exploded in recent months after TikTok videos showcased his creations. On one day in February, Mr. Louvard sold 2,300 pastries at his bakery in a bustling Paris neighborhood.“The whole planet is talking about us. Someone told me he even came from Madrid just to get a cookie — it's crazy,” Mr. Louvard said as he prepared a pan of croissants, ready to be cut in half and filled with chocolate chip cookie dough.The...

Doctorow noted that just as the Internet has made routine tasks less burdensome, it has also made scams much easier to pull off. Imagine an old-fashioned boiler room where fast-talking scammers make hundreds of phone calls in an attempt to cheat strangers out of their savings, he said. Now fast forward to 2024, when scammers will be able to send millions of phishing messages and emails with the help of bots.“If you can automate some parts of it,” Doctorow said, “you can cast a much wider net.”SMS scams netted Americans $300 million in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission reported. In the same year, Americans received 225 billion spam messages, a 157% increase from the previous year, according to a report from Robokiller, a company that sells a spam-blocking app.While digitally savvy and c...

An Israeli airstrike against Iran on Friday damaged an air defense system, according to Western and Iranian officials, and appeared calculated to convey the message that Israel could bypass Iran's defense systems undetected and cripple them.The attack damaged a defensive battery near Natanz, a city in central Iran that officials say is critical to the country's nuclear weapons program.Although the Israeli attack was a retaliation for last week's Iranian air barrage, it used a fraction of the firepower deployed by Tehran. That attack, intercepted by Israel and its allies, caused minimal damage.Friday's strike was the latest in a series of attacks between the two countries this month that have heightened fears of a broader regional conflict. The relatively limited scope of ...