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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...

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...