Blog

Move over, Microsoft and Apple. The stock market has a new king.On Tuesday, Nvidia leapfrogged two of the tech industry's most storied names to become the world's most valuable public company, according to data from S&P Global. Its rise has been fueled by the boom in generative artificial intelligence and growing demand for the company's chips – known as graphics processing units, or GPUs – that have made it possible to create artificial intelligence systems.Nvidia's rise is among the fastest in the history of the market. Just two years ago, the company's market valuation was just over $400 billion. Now, in the span of a year, it has gone from $1 trillion to more than $3 trillion.Nvidia's stock price rose 3.6% on Tuesday, bringing its value to $3.34 trillion. B...

Did the break make a difference?Aid groups say the pause appears to have taken hold, but it will not automatically result in a free flow of aid.Supplies are stored in warehouses before distribution. Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, said Tuesday that it was "almost impossible" to find warehouses in Rafah, the aid epicenter, because they had been destroyed or were inaccessible.Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Tuesday that 1,400 trucks of aid that had been transferred from Israel to Gaza "remain uncollected" by international organizations. Before the war, the enclave received about 500 truckloads of food and other goods a day, according to the United Nations' humanitarian affairs office.The entry of aid and commercial goods through Gaza'...

Lesa Walton had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for years. “It was terrible,” said Ms. Walton, 57, who lives in Wenatchee, Wash. “I kept getting sicker and sicker.”She also had high blood pressure and was obese. Doctors told her to go on a diet and exercise, which she did, to no avail.Then she found a doctor who prescribed Wegovy, one of the new obesity drugs. Not only has she lost more than 50 pounds, she said; Her arthritis resolved and she no longer needed pills to lower her blood pressure.Her new doctor, Dr. Stefie Deeds, an internist and obesity medicine specialist in private practice in Seattle, said Ms. Walton exemplifies a growing movement in obesity medicine.Proponents call it “obesity first.” The idea is to treat obesity with drugs approved for that use. As obesity come...

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin will travel to North Korea on Tuesday for the first time in 24 years after vowing to take ties with Pyongyang to new heights and jointly fight what he called the United States' "global neocolonial dictatorship" .The war against Ukraine brought Putin closer to the North's leader, Kim Jong-un, who gained new status in the Kremlin by opening his vast ammunition depots in Moscow.Nine months ago, after Kim arrived by armored train in the Russian Far East, the two men met at a Russian cosmodrome and toasted their "sacred struggle" against the West. The North Korean leader, between visits to sensitive Russian missile and fighter aircraft facilities, invited Putin to pay a reciprocal visit.Now the Russian president has accepted the offer. And the deepe...

After years of organizing Amazon workers and pressuring the company to bargain wages and working conditions, two major unions are teaming up to challenge the online retailer.The partnership was made permanent by voting that concluded Monday after members of the Amazon Labor Union, the only union formally representing Amazon warehouse workers in the United States, voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters , which has 1.3 million members. The vote was overseen by Amazon's union.The ALU scored a surprise victory in a Staten Island warehouse election in 2022. But it has yet to begin bargaining with Amazon, which continues to dispute the election results. Leaders of both unions said the affiliation agreement would put them in a better position to ch...

The United States on Monday imposed new sanctions aimed at cutting off weapons, supplies and funding to the Iran-backed Houthis, who control much of Yemen and have struck commercial vessels in the Red Sea to show support for Palestinians in Gaza.“The United States remains determined to use the full range of our tools to stop the flow of military-grade materials and funds from the sale of raw materials that enable these destabilizing terrorist activities,” Brian E. Nelson, Under Secretary of the Treasury Department for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement. The sanctions were imposed on two individuals and five entities that facilitated the procurement of weapons for the Houthis, as well as on one individual, one company and one ship that contributed to the shipment of ...

On a busy day at the Kwapong Health Center in rural Ghana, Beatrice Nyamekye inserted contraceptive implants into the arms of half a dozen women and gave eight or nine others a three-month hormone injection to prevent pregnancy. Some were looking for condoms or birth control pills, but most wanted something longer lasting.“They especially like the implants and injections,” said Ms Nyamekye, a community health nurse. “It frees them from worry and is private. They don't even have to discuss it with a husband or partner.The uproar at the Kwapong clinic is echoed throughout Ghana and much of sub-Saharan Africa, where women have the lowest rate of access to contraception in the world: only 26% of women of reproductive age in the region use a modern contraceptive method. – something othe...

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin will travel to North Korea for a two-day visit starting Tuesday to meet with a major arms supplier for his war against Ukraine.As the war dragged on, Russia found itself in desperate need of conventional weapons, including artillery shells, which North Korea could provide.Here's some background on what's happened so far and why it matters.What do we know about previous weapons shipments?The United States first accused North Korea of ​​selling artillery to Russia as early as September 2022, seven months into the war. North Korea denied the allegations at the time.Then, last August, the White House warned that Putin and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were holding arms negotiations, and in September, Kim visited Putin in eastern Russia. A f...

Remo Saraceni, the sculptor, toy inventor and technology fantasist best known for creating the Walking Piano to which Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced in a beloved scene from the 1988 hit film "Big," died June 3 at Swarthmore , Pennsylvania. 89.The cause was cardiac arrest, said Benjamin Medaugh, his assistant and caretaker. Mr. Saraceni died at Mr. Medaugh's home, where he had lived for the past several years.Mr. Saraceni's specialty was "interactive electronics," he told New York magazine in 1976. His other inventions included a clock that could respond aloud when you asked it the time, a stethoscope stereo system that could resonate your heartbeat and clouds of plexiglass that lights up at the sound of a whistle with a pastel color suitable for lighting a room. All were fue...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has disbanded his war cabinet, an Israeli official said Monday, after the departure of two top members prompted far-right politicians to demand representation in the influential group.The two members, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, left Netanyahu's small war cabinet last week due to disagreements over the direction of the war in Gaza. The men, both former military leaders, had been seen as voices of moderation in the body formed in October after the Hamas-led assault on Israel and which had made many decisions on the conflict.The Israeli official suggested that Netanyahu's decision to disband the body - which was communicated to ministers at a wider cabinet meeting on Sunday - was largely symbolic given that Gantz and Eisenkot had already ...