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Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday in exchange for four soldiers who had been held hostage by Hamas. Dozens of prisoners had served life sentences in Israeli prisons for attacks against Israelis.The Israeli Prison Service said in a statement that the prisoners had been released from Ofer prison near the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and from another facility near Beersheba in southern Israel.Israelis consider them terrorists, while many Palestinians say they have waged legitimate resistance to Israeli rule or see them as victims of Israel's decades-long occupation.Hundreds of Palestinians gathered at a municipal building in Ramallah to welcome the prisoners home, pushing to pick up their loved ones as they exited the Red Cross buses that were transporting th...

Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminal wife to end her life led him to become a pioneer crusader in the right-to-diet movement and publish "Final Exit," a best-selling guide to suicide, died Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94 years old.His death, in a hospice facility, was announced by his family.With a populist touch and a knack for speaking very firmly about death, Mr. Humphry nearly galvanized a national conversation about physician-assisted suicide in the early 1980s, a time when the idea had been little more than esoteric theory popularized by medical ethicists.“He was the one who really put this cause on the map in America,” said Ian Dowbiggin, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island and author of “A Concise History of Euthanasia: L...

So was it a Hitler salute or not?Speaking at President Trump's inauguration event this week, Elon Musk slapped his right hand on his chest before shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm down. He did it twice.It closely resembled the salute used in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. But almost immediately a surprising number of different interpretations began to circulate.Some commentators called it the “Roman salute”. Others described it as a “sincere” expression of joy, or dismissed it as simply awkward.The website of the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising the right arm straight with the palm facing down” and classifies it as “the most common white supremacist hand sign to the world."But after Musk's stiff salute, the Anti-Defa...

Mark Zuckerberg spent all 2024 telling investors that artificial intelligence would be the key to the future of his company, destination. In 2025, he planned to put his money where his mouth is.On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said that the company expected his capital expenses in 2025 to arrive at around $ 60 at $ 65 billion, a great increase compared to the metal of approximately $ 38 to $ 40 billion spent in 2024.Much of this amount will go to the construction and expand of the data centers, the natural size buildings that provide the calculation power that feeds the products and algorithms of Ai di Meta among its apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp."This is a huge effort, and in the coming years he will guide our main products and business, will unlock historical innovation a...

Early one evening in December, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country's most watched TV news channels turned to a cartoonist for expert opinion on the news.“Did you think this could happen so quickly?” A news anchor for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France's biggest literary stars, thanks in large part to his masterpiece, "The Arab of the Future," a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf's childhood, which was painstakingly divided between the Middle East and France and the disintegration of the marriage between his F...

A new study suggests a possible alternative to the abortion pill Mifepristone, a drug that continues to be a target of lawsuits and legislation by abortion opponents.But the potential substitute could further complicate the politics of reproductive health because it is also the key ingredient in a morning-after contraceptive pill.The new study, published Thursday in the journal Nejm Evidence, involved a drug called Ulipristal acetate, the active ingredient in the prescription contraceptive Ella, one of two types of morning pills approved in the United States. (The other, the one-step BB plan, which does not require a prescription, contains a different drug and does not work to terminate a pregnancy, according to scientific evidence.)In the study, 133 women who were up to nine weeks pregnan...

On the evening of January 18, a 32-year-old Greek man came to police with an unusual object he said he found in a plastic bag among garbage bins near the northern city of Thessaloniki.It was a headless, armless statue depicting a female form in a flowing, draped dress.Police announced on Wednesday that the statue is believed to date from the Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great, from around 323 BC to 31 BC.The find sparked an investigation among Greece's crime, traffic, antiquities and heritage protection units into its origins and how it might have ended up in the bin.The discovery of ancient artifacts in surprising places is not uncommon in a country as rich in history and archeology as Greece. Relics are often unearthed during construction projects, such as those i...

If you're looking for a new reason to be nervous about AI, try this: Some of the world's smartest humans are struggling to create tests that AI systems can't pass.For years, AI systems have been measured by giving new models a series of standardized benchmark tests. Many of these tests consisted of challenging SAT-caliber problems in areas such as math, science, and logic. Comparing model scores over time served as a rough measure of AI progress.But AI systems eventually became too good at these tests, so new, more difficult tests were created, often with the kinds of questions graduate students might encounter on exams.These tests are also not in good condition. New models from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have scored high on many doctoral-level challenges, limiting the us...

In the days after a ceasefire agreement took effect in the Gaza Strip, Israel turned its attention to a Palestinian town about 75 miles northeast of the enclave, a town with a long history of resistance and militant activity.On Wednesday, as some of its troops withdrew from Gaza, the Israeli army said it was carrying out an operation in Jenin, a city in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The city has been a hotbed of militancy and the target of raids by Israeli security forces for decades.Since the war in Gaza began, Hamas has become increasingly popular and established its presence in the West Bank. Iran – which supports Hamas and other militant groups in the region – has flooded the territory with weapons. And the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West B...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump's pick for health secretary, maintains his financial stake in major litigation against Merck over a widely used vaccine given to young people, according to ethics filings made public Wednesday and court documents. This conflict of interest could raise questions for lawmakers as Mr. Kennedy aims to run agencies that regulate the drugmaker.The ethics documents say Mr. Kennedy will continue to collect fees for cases in which he referred clients to Wisner Baum, a law firm that sued Merck over Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, and is given to adolescents to prevent cervical and other cancers later in life.The deal has earned Kennedy, one of the nation's fiercest vaccine critics, more than $2.5 million in recent yea...