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When President Biden arrives in France on Wednesday, he will rally European leaders to his side and demonstrate the resolve he helped foster on Ukraine's behalf.But he will also challenge the leaders themselves and remain virtually alone among Western democracies still firmly in support of Israel as it wages war in Gaza.When Biden arrives in France for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, it will be his first time in Europe since the October 7 terrorist attack led by Hamas, which killed 1,200 people in Israel and triggered military retaliation which killed around 36,000 people in Gaza. Next week he will return to Europe for a summit in Italy with Group of 7 leaders, and three weeks later he will host the 75th anniversary summit of NATO countries in Washington.The series of meet...

The Chinese know that the Internet in their country is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate things they shouldn't mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.Now they are finding that, beneath a facade full of short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet – and collective online memory – is disappearing in pieces.A widely shared May 22 WeChat post reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums and social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.“Chinese Internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” reads the headline. Predictably, t...

The Israeli military said Monday that four more hostages kidnapped in Hamas-led attacks on October 7 had died months ago in Gaza, a revelation likely to increase pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to proceed with a cease-and-desist. fire agreement.Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli army spokesman, said at a news conference on Monday that the four hostages were believed to have been killed together "several months ago" near Khan Younis, southern Gaza, as Israeli forces operated in the area. area. The military identified the men as Haim Perry, Yoram Metzger, Amiram Cooper and Nadav Popplewell.Admiral Hagari said the decision to announce the deaths of the hostages on Monday was based on "recently verified additional intelligence information, which made it po...

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...