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For many, France seems like a completely different place on Monday.The results of the first round of Sunday's legislative elections showed a deeply fragmented country, with a rising far right winning a record number of votes and the near collapse of President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party.“The far right at the gates of power,” read the cover of Le Parisien newspaper, the morning after the end of the first half of the early elections called by Mr. Macron.“Twelve million of our fellow citizens voted for a far-right party that is clearly racist and anti-republican,” the left-wing newspaper Libération said in an editorial, referring to Marine Le Pen's National Rally party. “The head of state threw France under the bus, the bus continued without slowing down, and is now parked i...

The Olympics have ancient origins. Now they will also have a dose of the latest technologies.This year, the highlights of the Summer Olympics will be narrated by artificial intelligence, and more specifically, by Al Michaels’ AI-generated storytelling.Executives at NBCUniversal and the Peacock streaming service said Wednesday that a customized daily highlight reel for the Olympics would be available to streaming subscribers. The reel will feature the voice of Mr Michaels, the 79-year-old American television host, who first covered the Olympics decades ago.Mr. Michaels, however, will not hole up in a TV booth every night to succinctly recap the dozens of Olympic events that have taken place. Instead, Peacock's program was trained by NBC clips of Michaels — he joined the network in 200...

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 became one of Chicago’s most celebrated philanthropists, once donating more than $100 million to a hospital where she once worked as a pediatric nurse, died Monday. She was 79.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 that she chafed at the trappings of wealth herself after marrying Robert H. Lurie.Mr. Lurie had built a real estate and investment empire as a partner at Equity Group Investments, teaming with a former Univ...

France begins a new week of frenetic election campaigning on Monday, a day after the far-right National Rally party dominated the first round of legislative elections that attracted an unusually high turnout and dealt a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron.Voters are being asked to choose their representatives in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lowest and most important house of the country's Parliament. They will return to the polls on July 7 for the second round of voting.If a new majority of anti-Macron MPs takes office, he will be forced to appoint a political opponent as prime minister, radically changing France’s domestic politics and confusing its foreign policy. This will be especially true if he is forced to govern alongside Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old president o...

Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer now living in exile in the Philadelphia suburbs, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s response recently has been severe, with vulgar and menacingly personal attacks online.According to researchers at Clemson University and Meta, the owner of 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. social media.The content, posted by users with fake identities, appeared in replies to Mr. Deng's posts on the social media platform arsonist and prostitute.“I tried to delete these posts,” Mr. Deng said of the online attacks, speaki...

Except for the worn posters of Iranian presidential candidates posted on highway overpasses, there were few signs this weekend that the country had held a presidential election on Friday and was heading for a runoff.There were almost no demonstrations to applaud the two major voters who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum and between whom the 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 from Tehran, Iran's capital: "We had a choice between...

When I was a child, my father, who had left the country only a few times, told me about the trip to Europe he took with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. She told me how much Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and the planters buzzing with flowers; the fireplace in the house on the hill outside Lugano, where her father was born, with ingenious niches on either side for hanging clothes or heating bread; the palpable poverty of the house in Pozzuoli, a city just outside Naples, where Nonie's aunt had covered the walls with newspapers to better insulate. Every now and then, my dad would take out the projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should repeat the trip together, or at least a short version where we went to Switz...

French voters went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of snap legislative elections that President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly called this month, a gamble that has thrown the country into deep uncertainty about its future.As of 5 p.m. local time on Sunday, the turnout was 59.39 percent, the Interior Ministry said. That's much higher than in the previous legislative election in 2022, when turnout over the same period was just 39.42 percent, demonstrating intense 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 country’s lower and highest house of parliament. A new majority of lawmakers opposed to Mr Macron would force him to appoint a political opponent as prime minister,...

In Japan, engineers are trying to make robots imitate a uniquely 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 claymation figurine of Gumby.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 humane.The “skin equivalent,” as researchers call it, made from living skin cells in the lab can scar, burn, and even heal itself, according to a study published June 25 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science."Human-like faces and expressio...