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J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a child to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2016, died on December 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82 years old.Alison Margaret Stoddart, her daughter, said she died of cardiac arrest in a hotel while visiting her other daughter, Fiona Jane McCubbin.Dr. Stoddart and his colleagues, Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France and Bernard L. Feringa of the Netherlands, first discovered how to build molecules with physical, rather than chemical, bonds. Those molecules could move freely and became the building blocks of nanomachines. The most basic ones, called catenanes, are interconnecte...

The Supreme Court on Friday wrestled with a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular social media platform with about 170 million users.Congress enacted the law because it fears that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to Chinese government influence and poses a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by January 19.Here are some key points:It seemed likely that the court would uphold the law.While judges across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, the overall tone and thrust seemed to suggest greater skepticism toward arguments from lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law.The questi...

Lebanon's prime minister traveled to the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday for his first official visit to meet the new government, after clashes along the two countries' shared border left several Lebanese soldiers injured last week.According to the Lebanese prime minister's office, Prime Minister Najib Mikati spoke with Ahmad al-Shara, the leader of the new Syrian government, on Saturday afternoon. Al-Shara leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic group that spearheaded the flash offensive that toppled the decades-long rule of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president, last month.Mikati's visit came after the election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanon's president this week, after two years in which the position remained vacant. Mr Aoun will soon start consultations on appointing a new prim...

James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-backed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the deaths of three people in a sweat lodge in 2009, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he led in the Arizona desert , died January 11, 2009. 3 in Henderson, Nevada. He was 67 years old.His brother Jon Ray announced his death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but said the death was unexpected.Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret,” espoused by Ray and others, was the idea that positive thinking can literally make the world change in your favor.Things began to move quickly for Mr. Ray. He ap...

Mauro Morandi, whose 32-year stay on an uninhabited Mediterranean island led him to be known as Italy's Robinson Crusoe, died Jan. 3 in Modena, Italy. He was 85 years old.The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said Antonio Rinaldis, who wrote a book with Morandi in 2023 about his life on the island.Unlike Daniel Defoe's hero, who was shipwrecked and fervently hoped to be rescued, Morandi chose his life of solitude.He said he fell in love at first sight with Budelli, a pristine, undeveloped island off the northern tip of Sardinia. He arrived in 1989, a bit by chance, he said in interviews. He left – against his will – in 2021, writing on social media that he was tired of “fighting against those who want to send me away”.Morandi's singular choice to live in solitude has given rise to at least two...

Constellation Energy, the nation's largest nuclear power plant operator, has agreed to buy another electricity producer, Calpine, for $16.4 billion, a deal that shows rapid growth in energy demand, partly due to building data centers for AI, is having far-reaching effects on the economy.The cash-and-stock deal, announced Friday, is among the energy industry's largest and indicates that natural gas will likely play a larger role than many expected a few years ago in meeting the nation's electricity needs. That could undermine efforts to address climate change unless companies quickly figure out how to capture and store emissions from gas-fired power plants.The combination would broaden Constellation's portfolio as companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon seek to secure power for data ...

The House on Thursday passed a bill that would impose sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court, launching a frontal attack on the court by rebuking its move to charge top Israeli leaders with war crimes over their offensive against Hamas in Gaza.The bill requires the president to freeze real estate assets and deny visas to all aliens who have materially or financially contributed to the court's efforts to "investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a protected person." Protected persons are defined as all current and former military and government officials of the United States and its allies who have not consented to the court's jurisdiction, such as Israel.The measure is one of several pushed through the House by Republicans last year, but it died in the Democratic-led S...

Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken, award-winning television news producer whose career was ultimately derailed by the ravages of multiple sclerosis, which he wrote about in a best-selling memoir, died Dec. 24 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a village in Westchester county. He was 76 years old.His wife, former "Today" host Meredith Vieira, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by acute respiratory failure.Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news business, working with luminaries such as Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But he took on a different topic when he wrote a memoir — and articles for HuffPost, The New York Times and other media — about managing MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.Mr. Cohen was diagnosed with MS in 1973, when he was 25...

The founder of the website used by Dominique Pelicot to invite dozens of men to rape his wife after drugging her was indicted Thursday in France on myriad charges, including some linked to that case.If found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 7.5 million euros, or about $7.7 million.The site's founder, Isaac Steidl, 44, was released from prison Thursday. The investigating judge's office said he was placed under "judicial control", had to pay bail of 100,000 euros and was barred from leaving France.The website he created in 2003, called coco.fr, became famous in France during the trial of Mr Pelicot and 50 other men, who were all found guilty last month, mainly of raping his now ex-wife of Mr. Pelicot, Gisèle, while she was heavily sedated.One of the charges again...

When the Supreme Court considers arguments on Friday on whether protecting national security requires selling or shutting down TikTok, the justices will be working in the shadow of three First Amendment precedents, all influenced by the climate of their times and how much the justices they trusted the government.During the Cold War and Vietnam era, the court refused to give credence to government claims that national security required limiting what newspapers could publish and what Americans could read. More recently, however, the Court has deferred to Congress' judgment that the fight against terrorism justifies making certain types of speech a crime.The court will most likely act quickly, as TikTok faces a January 19 deadline under a law enacted in April by bipartisan majorities. The bil...