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While many of Musk's posts, particularly those about gang-baiting, originated in the ecosystem of far-right bloggers and activists, they are also a temptation for mainstream politicians looking for a cudgel to use against their adversaries. And they turn to editors and broadcasters looking for a good story.“The British press and broadcasters, to some extent, have gone out of their way to publicize Elon Musk,” said David Yelland, former editor of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, The Sun. “The press has done it because it is extremely hostile to Keir Starmer. This is simply old Fleet Street prejudice.Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and founder of Enders Analysis, compared Musk to Murdoch, the Australian rebel media baron who shook up London's newspaper industry in the 1970s. “We just...

The Biden administration on Monday issued sweeping rules regulating how artificial intelligence chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an effort to create a global framework that will guide the spread of artificial intelligence around the world for years to come.With the power of artificial intelligence growing rapidly, the Biden administration has said the rules are needed to keep a transformative technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries who could use it to enhance its armies, carry out cyberattack operations, and otherwise threaten the United States.Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.The rules place various limit...

High-level ceasefire talks appeared to gain momentum Monday, as Arab and American mediators pressed for a deal to halt fighting in Gaza and release hostages held by Hamas before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes over. assignment on January 20th.It is not yet clear whether the sides have reached a resolution on all the central disputes that have proven insurmountable in previous rounds of negotiations, but officials have expressed optimism that a deal is achievable.President Biden suggested on Monday that a deal between Israel and Hamas was imminent. “We are on the brink of a proposal that I detailed months ago about the war between Israel and Hamas finally coming to fruition,” he said in a foreign policy speech.Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said there was "a real pos...

Most American parents hardly think about polio beyond the time their child is immunized against the disease. But there was a time in this country when polio paralyzed 20,000 people in a year, killing many.Vaccines have turned the tide against the virus. There has been only one case in the United States in the past decade, involving international travel.This could change very quickly if polio vaccination rates decline or the vaccine becomes less accessible.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who could become secretary of Health and Human Services, said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a myth.”And while Mr. Kennedy has said he has no intention of taking vaccines away from Americans, he has long argued that they are not as safe and effective as claimed.A...

Italy's justice minister has called for the reversal of the arrest of an Iranian wanted by the United States for allegedly supplying material used in the attack that killed three American soldiers, the Italian government announced Sunday.Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, 38, was arrested last month in Milan and the US Department of Justice had requested his extradition. He was accused of illegally supplying material used in a drone attack by an Iranian-backed militia on a US military base in Jordan.On Sunday evening, IRNA, Iran's state news agency, reported that Mr. Abedini had reached Tehran. Despite repeated requests for confirmation, Italy has not yet announced that it has freed the man or that he has left the country.The Italian ministry's request, which was filed in court, came just days a...

The months-long fight by lawmakers to ban the social media app TikTok in the United States came to a head Friday when the Supreme Court heard arguments to decide the app's fate for its 170 million American users.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.If TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is banned on January 19, here's what they can expect to happen:Will TikTok still be available for download on app stores?No. The law passed by Congress last year would make it illegal for the app stores of companies like Apple and Google to distribute or publish updates on Ti...

Israeli security and political chiefs are expected to arrive in Qatar on Sunday for high-level talks on a proposed ceasefire deal in Gaza that would see the release of hostages in the final days of President Biden's term and before Donald J. Trump take office.Biden administration officials have pushed for a deal that would become part of the outgoing president's legacy, and Trump has warned that "all hell will break loose in the Middle East" if Hamas does not release the hostages before he takes office next January. 20.Lower-level negotiations have begun in recent weeks, after months of stalemate.While some progress has been made, disagreements remain on several key points, including the timing and scope of Israel's redeployments and withdrawal from Gaza and its desire to end the war, acco...

Most of us don't think about pain until we feel it. And when we do, it's typically something we get over after a few days or weeks. This was my experience, until the summer of 2023. One day I woke up and found that my arms hurt. There was no obvious explanation, I hadn't done anything. The pain was intense. I couldn't do much: drive, cook, type, even sleep. I have always been a healthy person who played a lot of sport and I thought this strange pain was just bad luck. But as weeks turned into months and no cause or treatment could be found, I began to realize that I wasn't alone: ​​that there was an epidemic of chronic pain going on all around me.As my condition persisted, I began looking into what scientists understand — and still don't understand — about chronic pain. Mostly I was shocke...

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...