Blog

The New York Times is interested in the organ transplant system.Do you have a tip about irregularities in the system? If so, we need your help.If you are a doctor, nurse, technician, or anyone else who works on organ transplants, we would like to hear from you. We are also eager to speak with residents working in these transplant programs. And, of course, we also want to hear from patients and their families.

To enter a secret session of the German parliament, lawmakers must lock their phones and leave them outside. They can't even take notes inside. Yet to many politicians these precautions against espionage now seem like something of a farce.Because sitting next to them in those confidential meetings are members of the Alternative for Germany, the far-right party known by its German acronym, AfD.In the past few months alone, a prominent AfD politician has been accused of taking money from pro-Kremlin strategists. One of the party's parliamentary assistants turned out to have ties to a Russian intelligence agent. And some of its state lawmakers flew to Moscow to observe Russia's run elections.“Knowing for sure that sitting there, while these sensitive issues are being discussed...

The Biden administration will award up to $6.6 billion in grants to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the leading maker of the most advanced microchips, in an effort to bring some of the most cutting-edge semiconductor technologies to the United States.The funds, which come from the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, will help support the construction of TSMC's first major U.S. hub, in Phoenix. The company has already committed to building two plants at the site and will use some of the grant money to build a third plant in Phoenix, U.S. officials said Sunday. TSMC will also increase its total investments in the United States to more than $65 billion, up from $40 billion.Bringing the world's most sophisticated chip manufacturing to the United States has been a major ...

On Sunday the hospital waiting room was silent: there was no crowd of relatives, no sea of ​​patients. Israeli air defenses had just repelled a large-scale Iranian attack, recording only one serious casualty.But there was no sense that a crisis had been averted outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. Instead, tension filled the air until the ward doors opened and a panting mother stepped out, her face contorted. Then raw emotion quickly took over as she collapsed into a chair, crying.While Israel suffered little significant damage overnight, this family suffered a devastating blow. Amina al-Hasoni, 7 years old, was clinging to life and was the only serious victim of the Iranian barrage. And if not for systemic inequ...

Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called "coercive control," which describes the psychological and physical domination that abusers use to punish their partners, died March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Connecticut. 82.His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was most likely a heart attack that occurred while he was on a Zoom call with women's advocates in British Columbia.Through studies begun in 1979, Drs. Stark and Flitcraft became experts in intimate partner violence, raising the alarm that beatings — and not car accidents or sexual assaults — were the leading cause of injuries that sent women to the emergency room.But in speaking with battered women and veterans who had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder as a result ...

Iran has retaliated directly against Israel for the killing of its generals in Damascus, Syria, with an attack of more than 300 drones and missiles aimed at restoring its credibility and deterrence, officials and analysts say.This represents a time of great risk, with key questions still to be answered, they say. Was Iran's attack enough to satisfy its demands for revenge? Or, given the relatively paltry results – almost all drones and missiles have been intercepted by Israel and the United States – will he feel compelled to strike again? And will Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, consider the excellent performance of his country's air defenses as a sufficient response? Or will he choose to escalate further with an attack on Iran itself?Now that Iran has attacked ...

Computers seem methodical, deliberate, and utterly predictable. But they can also behave in completely random ways. As researchers build ever more powerful machines, a key question is: what role will randomness play?On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year's Turing Prize will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born theoretical computer mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in randomness.Often called the Nobel Prize in computing, the Turing Prize carries a prize of $1 million. The award is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped lay the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century.Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who...

For decades, Israel and Iran have fought a shadow war across the Middle East, trading clandestine attacks on land, sea, air and in cyberspace. The barrage of drones and missiles fired by Iran at Israel on Saturday – although nearly all were shot down or intercepted – marked a watershed in the conflict.It was the first time Iran had directly attacked Israel from its own territory, according to Ahron Bregman, a political scientist and expert on Middle East security issues at King's College London, who called it a "historic event."Iran has widely used foreign agents to target Israeli interests, while targeted assassinations of Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists have been a key part of Israel's strategy. Here is a brief history of the conflict:January 2020: Israel welcom...

The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, which controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family's name from endowment funds.The petition filed Thursday by the Academy in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to change the terms of the donations so the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.The move follows a New York Times report last year that examined donations from several Sacklers, including an executive at Purdue Pharma, which made the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling the crisis of opioids that has claimed thousands of lives.“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it i...

A cable car carrying passengers in a mountainous area of ​​southern Turkey broke down after colliding with part of the metal structure supporting it on Friday, sending its eight terrified occupants plummeting to the rocky slope below.One passenger was killed, seven were injured and nearly 200 others were trapped in other cabins in midair, some overnight and then for hours into Saturday afternoon, as rescuers worked to free them from the paralyzed line.Helicopters, cranes and hundreds of rescue workers were deployed to the area to evacuate a total of 174 people, Turkey's interior minister said. Those affected include children, local residents and foreign tourists who were stranded in cabins, some of them tens of meters above the ground in the Sarisu area of ​​Antalya province, official...