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American and Israeli officials expressed renewed optimism Thursday about a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, after Hamas reversed its position and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later told President Biden he would send a new negotiating delegation to the stalled talks.White House officials said they believed the new progress in the talks amounted to what has repeatedly been called a “breakthrough” in the months-long negotiations, though they said it would take time to work out the many steps involved in implementing the truce. Israeli and other officials involved in the talks agreed that there had been progress, but described it in more cautious terms.The discussions are based on a three-phase framework agreement made public by President Biden in late May and endorsed by the Uni...

Spring Fertility, a clinic in Midtown Manhattan, looks like the place where the main characters on “Broad City” would have wound up if the millennial sitcom had done an episode about egg freezing. The waiting room has books by America’s youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman and its Instagram poet laureate Rupi Kaur. The kitchen is stocked with Spindrift. A conference room also serves as a venue for “shots nights,” less raucous than they sound, where patients inject themselves with fertility drugs communally, with encouragement from staff.Spring’s medical director in New York, Catha Fischer, dressed in a loose blouse and a low ponytail, beamed as she showed me the phlebotomy stations and operating room, where patients are anesthetized so that a doctor can puncture their ovaries with a needle an...

Germany's first African-born member of parliament said this week that he would not run again in next year's general election. Although he downplayed racism as a factor, he made the announcement shortly after his staff released the contents of a series of hate mail and death threats his office had received.The lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, a 62-year-old Senegalese first elected in 2013, said in a letter to his colleagues that he wanted to make room for a new generation of politicians and that racism was “not the main reason” for his decision. But he was outspoken about the abuse he has faced, which has increased in volume and tone in recent years.In 2020, bullets were fired through the window of his district office, and last year the office was targeted by an arson attack."I can't un...

Early last year, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and stole details about the design of the company’s artificial intelligence technologies.The hacker stole details from discussions in an online forum where employees discussed OpenAI’s latest technologies, but was unable to break into the systems where the company hosts and develops its artificial intelligence, according to two people familiar with the incident.OpenAI executives disclosed the incident to employees at an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco offices in April 2023, the people said, during which they discussed sensitive company information on condition of anonymity.But executives decided not to share the news publicly because no customer or partner information...

From the outside, the last few years seemed like the pinnacle of Abdulaziz Almuzaini's career.As the head of an animation studio in Saudi Arabia, he signed a five-year deal with Netflix in 2020. A sarcastic cartoon franchise he helped create, “Masameer,” likened to a Saudi version of “South Park,” was soon streaming to audiences around the world. And as the conservative Islamic kingdom relaxed, Mr. Almuzaini was publicly celebrated, until a few months ago, as one of the homegrown talents shaping its nascent entertainment industry.Behind the scenes, however, he was on trial in an opaque national security court, while Saudi prosecutors, who accused him of promoting extremism through the cartoon series and social media posts, sought to ensure he would spend the rest of his life in prison ...

A scientist whose research was at the center of a controversy over a potential Alzheimer's drug has been charged with fraud.A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York, on charges of falsifying data to obtain grants totaling about $16 million from the National Institutes of Health.Dr. Wang’s studies have supported research on a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and on simufilam, a drug in late-stage clinical trials. Simufilam’s maker, Cassava Sciences, a Texas-based pharmaceutical company, has claimed that the drug improves cognition in Alzheimer’s patients.Alzheimer's disease affects about six million Americans, a number that is expected to double by 2050, and promising treatments generate enormous excitement. Cassava&...

Britain votes in long-awaited elections.

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the first legal challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements, which is scheduled to take effect in September.Judge Ada Brown granted an injunction sought by several plaintiffs, saying the ban cannot be enforced against them pending a final ruling.But while the ruling was preliminary, it said the FTC had no “substantive authority to issue regulations” regarding unfair competition practices and that the plaintiffs “would likely succeed on the merits” of their challenge.Judge Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas said he expects to issue a final decision by the end of August.The commission “supports our clear authority, supported by statute and precedent, to issue this rule,” said Douglas Farrar, a s...

Israeli forces killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a drone strike in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, prompting the Lebanese militia to respond with heavy rocket fire across the border.The flare-up came as Western diplomats worked to avert a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, a danger that appears to have grown in recent weeks. Cross-border firefights have intensified, and Israeli officials have spoken publicly of shifting their military focus from Hamas in the Gaza Strip to Hezbollah, a far more advanced and potent threat.Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser who has become the de facto U.S. envoy to quell the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, conferred with French officials in Paris on Wednesday to discuss ways to defuse rising tensions. Jean-Yves Le Drian, President Emmanuel ...

V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells opened a new class of drugs and helped save the lives of millions of women, died June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76.Balkees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Dr. Jordan and cared for him for several years, said the cause was kidney cancer.Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous, even obsessive, researcher, a quality demonstrated in his work on tamoxifen. The drug was first synthesized in 1962, although it was discarded because it failed not only to prevent conception but, in some cases, to promote it.But Dr. Jordan, then a doctoral student at the University of Leeds in Britain, saw something no one else had. It had long been known that e...