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Israeli negotiators traveled to the Gulf nation of Qatar for the first time in weeks on Friday to resume talks on a ceasefire deal that could end the war in Gaza and free hostages held there, after weeks of deadlock in negotiations.According to an official familiar with the visit, David Barnea, head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, led the Israeli delegation to Doha, the capital of Qatar, and met with Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar's prime minister.Ceasefire negotiations had been stalled for weeks until Wednesday, when Hamas announced it had exchanged ideas with mediators on a new way forward. Both U.S. and Israeli officials said Hamas’ revised position could allow for a deal, but warned that it still faced a series of long and difficult de...

“Hey, buddy, how you doing?” said a man wearing a Boba Fett costume as he leaned over the bed of a young boy in a hospital gown.It was a Sunday afternoon in the emergency room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Dr. Alex Arroyo, the hospital's director of pediatric emergency medicine, often dons one of more than 20 costumes when he sees patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famous bounty hunter from the "Star Wars" movies.“I love what I do, but it’s really hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. She started wearing costumes in 2021.A die-hard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, Dr. Arroyo has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con eac...

Count Binface, Elmo and a man wearing a balaclava with a print of baked beans all had their very brief moments of glory in this British election.As is a long tradition in Britain, elections include a variety of joke candidates, often competing with prominent politicians. While obviously comic relief in a serious time, the candidates are nonetheless there to make a point: since the 1970s, they have aimed to bridge the gap between politics and ordinary people.On election night, these joke candidates share the stage as they learn who won their constituency. That's how you get photos of the country's new prime minister shaking hands with a man in an Elmo suit, without even batting an eyelid.That's also how you get the photo of Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former cabinet minister who lost his...

Japan this week eliminated all regulations requiring the use of floppy disks for administrative purposes, making up for lost time 13 years after the country's manufacturers produced their last units.The floppy disk, invented in the 1970s, was once a ubiquitous part of computing. Since then, other forms of storage such as flash drives and Internet cloud storage have taken over. By the 1990s, it, along with the music cassette, was tossed into the dustbin of obsolete technology.But not in Japan. While famous for its consumer electronics giants, robots, and some of the world’s fastest broadband networks, the country has also been wedded to floppy disks and other old technologies like fax machines and cash.Japan began to abandon the 1900s storage devices, plastic-coated magnetic disks, only...

One promised to confront Iran's enemies, the other vowed to make peace with the world. One intends to double down on social restrictions, the other promises to loosen stifling rules for young people and women. One identifies as an Islamic ideologue, the other as a pragmatic reformist.The race to become Iran's next president has turned into a fierce contest in which, for the first time in more than a decade, the outcome is hard to predict. The winner will be decided in a runoff on Friday after a general election a week earlier failed to produce a candidate with the required 50 percent of the vote.The outcome could depend on how many Iranians who skipped voting in the general election decide to participate in the runoff. Voter turnout hit an all-time low of 40 percent last week, with...

It didn’t become part of vaccination programs in Africa until 2024.What if it had come faster?What if the shots had arrived9 years ago?143,000.That’s how many children’s deaths could have been averted.By Stephanie NolenStephanie Nolen interviewed more than 30 scientists, health officials and other key players in the development of the malaria vaccines to report this article.July 5, 2024Nurses in countries from Sierra Leone to Cameroon are packing a new vaccine into the coolers they tote to villages for immunization clinics: a shot to protect against malaria, one of the deadliest diseases for children.Babies and toddlers in eight countries in the region recently started to get the vaccine as part of their routine childhood shots. Seven other African countries are eagerly awaiting its arriva...

A landslide victory for the Labour Party.

Sitting near a window at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, overlooking the duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in computing power a dollar could buy over the past 85 years.A neon green line rose steadily across the page, like fireworks in the night sky.That diagonal line, he said, shows why humanity is just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long-hyped moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and equip themselves with millions of times more computing power than their biological brains currently provide.“If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t predict what it will do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse wa...

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...