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Arnaud Gaudillat, a history teacher in France, recalled breaking down in tears as he watched television coverage of the flames that swept through Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019. “We could do nothing but watch it burn,” he said.Now, five years later, as hundreds of architects, engineers and metalworkers race to finish rebuilding the cathedral's roof coverings and electrical cables by the end of the year, Gaudillat will not stand on the sidelines. He will build his Notre-Dame. One made up of 4,383 Lego pieces.Lego, the world's largest toy company, launched a model of Notre-Dame Cathedral on Saturday, complete with rose windows, bell towers and a central spire surrounded by statues. The set, designed for adults, will be part of the company's collection of sets based on architectu...

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a generative AI feature for the company's search engine last month, he and his colleagues demonstrated the new capability with six text-based queries for the public to try .Questions included “how do I clean a fabric sofa” and “what should I use to get a coffee stain out of my carpet.” These were intended to highlight how Google's new feature, AI Overviews, could generate comprehensive and useful summaries of information on top of traditional search results.But on Friday, only one of six queries still provided an overview of the AI, according to The New York Times' tests. Instead, the functionality was noticeably less widespread. A search for “what should I use to get a coffee stain out of my carpet” now resulted in a snippet of text ...

Friday's remarks were Biden's first public statements on the war since an Israeli attack and subsequent fire on Sunday killed at least 45 people, including children, and injured 249 in a camp for displaced people, according to health officials in Gaza. A visual analysis by The New York Times found that Israel used American-made bombs in the attack, forcing the White House to face tough questions about American responsibility for the rising death toll.Mr Biden said on Friday he had seen “terrible images” of the deadly fire.“The Palestinian people have endured hell in this war,” Biden said after describing the pain of those whose relatives were “massacred by Hamas terrorists on October 7” and the “anguish” of waiting Israeli families of the release of the hostages. .Biden also said...

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday raised concerns about the health effects of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing flaws in a company's studies that could pose major hurdles to approval of a treatment expected to help people who struggle with the condition.The agency said bias crept into the studies because participants and therapists were easily able to tell who received MDMA versus a placebo. It also reported “significant increases” in blood pressure and heart rate that could “trigger cardiovascular events.”The staff analysis was conducted for an independent advisory panel that will meet Tuesday to consider an application from Lykos Therapeutics to use MDMA-assisted therapy. The agency's concerns highlight the unique and complex issues facing ...

A day after U.S. officials said Ukraine might use American weapons in limited attacks inside Russia, a deepfake video of an American spokesperson discussing that policy appeared online.The fabricated video, taken from real footage, shows State Department spokesman Matthew Miller appearing to suggest that the Russian city of Belgorod, just 25 miles north of the Ukraine-Russia border, was a legitimate target for such attacks.The 49-second video clip, which has an authentic feel despite tell-tale signs of manipulation, illustrates the growing threat of misinformation and in particular so-called deepfake videos powered by artificial intelligence.U.S. officials said they had no information on the video's origins. But they are particularly concerned about how Russia might use such technique...

Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, gave a personal tour of the electric carmaker's factory in Austin, Texas this week to select shareholders.“Please let us know if you have any questions about voting your Tesla shares!” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.It was just one of at least a dozen posts Musk has made about X in recent weeks, as Tesla shareholders voted him a $46.5 billion pay package.To encourage approval of the package, Musk shared sizzling footage of Tesla vehicles hurtling across deserts at dusk on X. He said he needs enough shares in the company to maintain control, especially as he ramps up his artificial intelligence efforts. And he lashed out at investors who have said they will oppose paying him.“Thank you to all Vote Tesla supporters!” Mr. Mus...

Residents who returned to the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya on Friday expected to find mass devastation, but said they were still shocked by the level of ruin they saw after three weeks of an Israeli offensive in the dense urban area.“The destruction is indescribable,” said Mohammad Awais, who returned with his family to their home in Jabaliya on Friday. “Our minds are unable to comprehend what we are seeing.”He said he and his family walked along devastated streets for nearly an hour in the heat and saw that no vehicles could navigate streets blocked by piles of rubble from homes and shops that had been destroyed by the Israeli army.As they walked, rescuers passed by, carrying the wounded and the bodies of those killed on stretchers. Some bodies were found in the streets, others were d...

Long before people develop dementia, they often begin to fall behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined data from Medicare with data from Equifax, the credit agency, to study how people's borrowing behavior has changed in previous years and following the diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a similar disease. I disturb.What they found was surprising: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin to decline dramatically long before their disease is formally identified. One year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2% more likely to have defaulted on mortgage payments than before the onset of the diseas...

Debris covered a street and firefighters rushed to rescue people from an apartment building hit by a Russian missile Friday morning in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. A fire broke out and, minutes after the missile's first hit, another hit the same location in a tactic known as double tap, intended to target rescue workers.It was precisely the type of attack Ukraine cited when it appealed to allies to allow it to do more to defend itself from Russian bombing. That consensus finally arrived in a meaningful way on Thursday, when the United States changed its policy, saying Ukraine could defend itself by striking military targets in Russia with American-supplied weapons.The change is narrow in scope, granting Ukraine permission to use American air defense systems, guided rockets and a...

When OpenAI unveiled the latest version of its wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot this month, it had a new voice that possessed human inflections and emotions. The online demonstration also involved the bot teaching a child to solve a geometry problem.Much to my chagrin, the demo turned out to be essentially a bait and switch. The new ChatGPT was released without most of the new features, including improved voice (which the company told me it has pushed back to make fixes). Even the ability to use a phone camera to get real-time analysis of something like a math problem isn't yet available.Amid the delay, the company also disabled the ChatGPT voice that some said resembled actress Scarlett Johansson, after threatening legal action, replacing it with a different female voice.For now, wha...