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Taliban officials attended a rare UN-led conference of global envoys in Afghanistan on Sunday, the first such meeting that Taliban representatives agreed to attend, after organizers said Afghan women would be excluded from interviews.The two-day conference in Doha, Qatar, is the third of its kind. It is part of a United Nations-led effort, known as the “Doha process,” which began in May 2023. It aims to develop a unified approach to international engagement with Afghanistan. Envoys from around 25 countries and regional organizations will participate, including the European Union, the United States, Russia and China.Taliban officials were not invited to the first meeting and refused to attend the second, held in February, after objecting to the inclusion of Afghan civil society groups pre...

Ann Lurie, a self-described hippie who later became one of Chicago's most celebrated philanthropists, in one case donating more than $100 million to a hospital where she once worked as a pediatric nurse, died Monday. She was 79 years old.Her death was announced in a statement from Northwestern University, to which Ms. Lurie, a trustee, had donated more than $60 million. The statement does not say where she died or specify a cause.An only child raised in Miami by a single mother, Ms. Lurie protested the Vietnam War while in college and planned to join the Peace Corps after graduation. In interviews, she said she chafed at the trappings of wealth even after she married Robert H. Lurie.Mr. Lurie had built a real estate and investment empire as a partner at Equity Group Investments, work...

The National Rally party won a landslide victory in the first round of voting for the French National Assembly on Sunday, according to early projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist, anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time .Pollsters’ projections, usually reliable and based on preliminary results, suggested the party would win about 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and its allies, who won about 22 percent, placing them in third place.A coalition of left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, ranging from moderate Socialists to the far left of France Indomitable, was projected to win about 29 percent of the vote, buoyed by strong support among young people.Turnout was high, around 67...

Engineers in Japan are trying to get robots to imitate that particularly human expression: the smile.They created a face mask from human skin cells and attached it to robots using a new technique that hides the bond and is flexible enough to transform into a grimace or a soft smile.The effect is halfway between the terrifying Hannibal Lecter mask and the Gumby claymation figure.But scientists say the prototypes pave the way for more sophisticated robots, with an outer layer that is elastic and strong enough to protect the machine while making it more human-like.In addition to expressiveness, the "skin equivalent," as researchers call it, which is made in the laboratory from living skin cells, can scar and burn and even self-heal, according to a study published June 25 in the journal Cell R...

Aside from the tattered posters of Iranian presidential candidates plastered on highway overpasses, there were few signs this weekend that the country had held a presidential election on Friday and was headed for a runoff.There were almost no demonstrations to applaud the two most voted candidates, who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum and between whom Iranians will decide on July 5.Even from the government's official numbers, it was clear that the real winner of Friday's election was Iran's silent majority who either left their ballots blank or did not vote at all. About 60 percent of eligible voters did not vote or cast a blank ballot.That's because there was no point in voting, said Bita Irani, 40, a housewife in Tehran, Iran's capital: "We had to cho...

When I was a child, my father, who had left the country only a few times, told me about the trip he took to Europe with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. He told me how Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and the flowerbeds that sparkled with flowers; the fireplace in the house on the hill outside Lugano, where his father was born, with ingenious alcoves on either side for hanging clothes or warming bread; the palpable poverty of the house in Pozzuoli, a town just outside Naples, where Nonie’s aunt had lined the walls with newspaper for better insulation. Every so often, my father would get out his projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should do the trip again—or at least a short version where we’d go to Switzerland and Ita...

French voters turned out en masse on Sunday for the first round of early legislative elections unexpectedly called this month by President Emmanuel Macron, a gamble that has plunged the country into deep uncertainty about its future.At midday on Sunday, the turnout rate was almost 26 percent, the Interior Ministry said, the highest rate since 1981 for a similar election and at the same time of day, demonstrating strong interest in a vote that will determine the future of Mr Macron's second term.Voters are choosing their 577 representatives in the National Assembly, the lowest and most important house of the country's Parliament. A new majority of MPs opposed to Macron would force him to appoint a political opponent as prime minister, radically changing France's domestic politi...

Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer now living in exile in suburban Philadelphia, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s response of late has been harsh, with scathing and menacingly personal online attacks.According to researchers at Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, a secret propaganda network linked to the country’s security services bombarded not only Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms.The content, posted by users with false identities, appeared in replies to Mr Deng’s posts on social media platform X, as well as on the accounts of public schools in their community, where his daughter, who is 16, was falsely portrayed as a drug ...

Iranian voters demonstrated their displeasure with Iran’s clerical system of governance during Friday’s presidential election, turning out in record numbers to help two establishment candidates limp to a runoff.The July 5 runoff will offer voters the final choice between a reformist former health minister, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, and an ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, neither of whom managed to secure more than 50 percent of the vote needed to win the presidency. That postpones for another week the question of who will lead Iran through challenges including an ailing economy, a divide between rulers and ruled, and a looming war that continues to threaten to drag Iran further down the drain.But despite belonging to two different factions, neither is expected to bri...

Ever since scientists discovered earlier this year that the flu infects American cows, they have wondered how it spread from one animal to another. An experiment conducted in Kansas and Germany shed some light on the mystery.Scientists have failed to find evidence that the virus can spread as a respiratory infection. Juergen Richt, a virologist at Kansas State University who helped lead the research, said the findings suggest the virus is transmitted primarily through contaminated milking machines.In an interview, Dr. Richt said the findings offer hope that the outbreak can be stopped before the virus evolves into a form that could spread easily among humans."I think it's good news that we can probably control this more easily than people thought," Dr. Richt said. "Hopefully we can n...