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Using her arms as a makeshift slat, a Sudanese woman in a black hijab and black-and-white kaftan clapped her hands, signaling the start of rehearsals. The other amateur actors, wearing comical stick-on mustaches, moved toward their goals, improvising a scene in a women's beauty salon where a customer's hair is accidentally dyed blue.By the time the scene was over, all the women were hysterical and teasing each other about how they could play their parts better next time. Scenes like this are common at the Kuluhenna Creative Workshop, held in a clubhouse on the outskirts of this Yorkshire town. The workshop is open to all local women, but with a focus on immigrant communities, including refugees and asylum seekers.The 90-minute class, which the Mafwa Theater has been holding sinc...

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labor Party, will face off on Tuesday evening in their first debate of the British general election. But it is a third man, Nigel Farage, who catches the eye in a race characterized, so far, by a leader in decline and an adversary on the rise.Farage, a cheerful rebel who has long roamed the right-wing fringes of British politics, has said he will run as a candidate for Reform UK, a party he co-founded. This has shaken up the race and threatens to siphon votes from Sunak's Conservative Party, given Reform UK's strident anti-immigration message.Farage's entry into the race is not in itself transformative. He ran seven times for a seat in the British Parliament, losing each time. But his return could give im...

Anadol said that every artist wants to see “what is beyond reality” and “perceive worlds that don't exist.” Artificial intelligence is a vehicle for the imagination, which he says could represent “hallucinations, dreams, fantasies.”The technology we deal with today is no longer “just a pen, or a printing press” and “not just a car or a wheel”. Instead "it's intelligence", he said, she said. “It's mimicking our reasoning right now and will evolve. It will turn into something else.” And this “has never happened before in our history”.Currently, he explained, artificial intelligence is “50% human, 50% machine”. In the future, she said, artificial intelligence will be “designed from the ground up: to see, to hear, to feel” and to produce “a living art form” that will be “a sy...

The future of art is the main theme of “Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinema, Amplified Voices,” a film and video installation that coincides with this year's Venice Biennale. Organized by Qatar Museums and featuring around 40 artists from the region, it speaks to the emergence of the Middle East as a force in various art forms, not to mention the force in changing the narrative on how the region is represented in films and 'art.The future is in the mind of Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, president of Qatar Museums and the Doha Film Institute. Al Mayassa sees this year's Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice, convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by New York Times journalists, as an opportunity to raise the profile of artis...

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former government scientist celebrated and scorned for his work on Covid, forcefully denied Republican charges Monday that he helped fund the research that sparked the pandemic or hid the possibility that it had originated in a laboratory, calling the allegations “absolutely false and simply absurd.”In an occasionally testy appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dr. Fauci read aloud a February 2020 email urging a prominent scientist who was then suspicious about a leak from the lab “to determine whether his concerns are validated” and if so, report them “very quickly” to the FBI“It is inconceivable that anyone reading this email would conclude that I was trying to hide the possibility of a lab leak,” Dr. Fauci testified.Monday...

Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit activist and serial disruptor of British politics, announced plans on Monday to stand in Britain's general election next month, dealing a fresh setback to the prospects of the country's embattled prime minister, Rishi Sunak.The surprise announcement by Farage, who represents a far-right rebel movement fighting to curb immigration, threatens to upend the campaign by taking votes away from Britain's ruling Conservative Party. In doing so, it could make it even more difficult for Sunak and his party to narrow the double-digit gap in the polls with the opposition Labor Party.Divisive, charismatic and famous for his communication skills, Farage was one of the architects of Brexit, which a narrow majority of Britons supported in a 2016 referendum. Some a...

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke.Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets.They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had hi...

For months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to offer a timeline for ending the war against Hamas in Gaza, a reticence that his critics see as a political tactic. But it was put in a bind this weekend by President Biden's announcement outlining a proposed truce.Netanyahu, a conservative, has long juggled competing personal, political and national interests. Now he appears to face a difficult choice between the survival of his tough, uncompromising government and the return home of the hostages held in Gaza, as he sets himself and Israel on a new course away from growing international isolation.The prime minister's critics have painted him as indecisive and say there are two Netanyahus: one who functions pragmatically in the small war cabinet he has formed wit...

In Georgia, protesters waving European Union flags rallied against what they see as their pro-Russian leaders. Moldova's government is pushing to join the bloc, infuriating citizens hoping for closer relations with Moscow. Armenia has also reached out to Europe, angered that longtime ally Moscow is courting its enemy Azerbaijan.Fueled in part by the war in Ukraine, tensions have risen in some of the former Soviet Union's territories, pitting those who favor closer relations with Russia against those who are more European-oriented.Many of these tensions predate the war, rooted in long-standing internal struggles over power, money and other issues, but have been amplified by geopolitics, with both Russia and the West pushing countries to choose sides to stay.In the former Soviet Un...

Listen and follow 'Hard Fork'Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YoutubeThis week, Google found itself in more turmoil, this time over its new AI Overview feature and a series of leaked internal documents. Then Josh Batson, a researcher at AI startup Anthropic, joins us to explain how an experiment that made chatbot Claude obsess over the Golden Gate Bridge represents a major breakthrough in understanding how large language models work. Finally, we take a look at recent developments in AI security, after Casey's early access to OpenAI's new souped-up voice assistant was revoked for security reasons.Guests:Additional reading:Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose AND Casey Newton and produced by Whitney Jones AND Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Poyant only. Engineering...