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The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, which controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family's name from endowment funds.The petition filed Thursday by the Academy in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., seeks to change the terms of the donations so the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.The move follows a New York Times report last year that examined donations from several Sacklers, including an executive at Purdue Pharma, which made the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling the crisis of opioids that has claimed thousands of lives.“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it i...

In front of cameras and a crowd of nearly 300 guests, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, rushed to the far end of a polo field in South Florida on Friday.“The Duke of Sussex could score a goal!” shouted an announcer over a loudspeaker at the Royal Salute Polo Challenge to Benefit Sentebale, attended by spectators including Serena Williams and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Netflix film crews. The streamer is producing a polo-related project starring Harry and Meghan that was announced Thursday and will be filmed in Wellington, an affluent area near Palm Beach known for its equestrian scene.The announcer and many in the audience groaned loudly when Harry missed his shot. He wore a blue and white shirt with the number 2 on it, along with the logo for Sentebale, a charity he founded to support ...

Computers seem methodical, deliberate, and utterly predictable. But they can also behave in completely random ways. As researchers build ever more powerful machines, a key question is: what role will randomness play?On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year's Turing Prize will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born theoretical computer mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in randomness.Often called the Nobel Prize in computing, the Turing Prize carries a prize of $1 million. The award is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped lay the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century.Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who...

The US military said it shot down dozens of drones and missiles that Iran fired at Israel on Saturday, while other allies affirmed support for Israel or pledged to help defend it.Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israel's chief military spokesman, said Israel had intercepted most of the 200 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles launched by Iran with "some assistance" from its allies.Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said Saturday evening that U.S. forces intercepted dozens of missiles and attack drones launched at Israel from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The United States provided no further details about its role in intercepting the attacks.Although President Biden has increasingly criticized the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is handling the campaign against Ha...

Yuxin Sun, a psychologist in Seattle, sees many clients in her associate practice who insist they are not perfectionists. “'Oh, I'm not perfect. I'm far from perfect,'” they tell her.But perfectionism isn't about being the best at a certain goal, Dr. Sun said, "it's the feeling of never getting to that point, of never feeling good enough, of never feeling adequate." And this can create a harsh inner voice that belittles and chastises us.Perfectionism is so pervasive that there is a test to measure it: the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. When researchers examined how college students responded to the scale's questions over time, they found that rates of perfectionism have increased in recent decades, skyrocketing between 2006 and 2022.Thomas Curran, an ...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky likely changed the fate of thousands of Ukrainian men when he signed a law lowering the conscription age to 25 from 27 this month, more than two years after Russia began its full-scale invasion .Ukrainian forces are struggling to hold back the much larger Russian army and desperately need to replenish their ranks. Now many of the young people who remain in Ukraine – thousands of others have fled the country illegally – worry about their future.New York Times reporters spoke with Ukrainian men who may be affected by the change."I'm worried, even a little scared"Yegor Khomchenko, the owner of a communal bakery in eastern Ukraine who turns 25 next month, said he had many friends who had gone to war.But he said his wife, Amelia, told him he would "do...

Jackson Hinkle has cultivated an online persona so incendiary that he has been kicked off YouTube, Twitch and Instagram.It rages undaunted, even energetic. He regularly produces a podcast on Rumble, a website popular with many prominent conservatives. He writes dozens of posts a day onMeanwhile, he used false or misleading content, promoted manipulated images and made comments that watchdog organizations denounced as anti-Semitic. He calls himself an American patriot even as he praises American adversaries, including Vladimir V. Putin, Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."LEAVE A LIKE if you stand with IRAN in the face of ISRAELI TERRORISM!" he wrote last week on X after an Israeli airstrike in Syria killed several Iranian military officers. The next day he addressed the Houthi lead...

The disappearance and death of an Israeli teenager, whose body was found in the West Bank on Saturday, has sparked deadly riots by Israeli settlers in Palestinian villages, further increasing tension in the occupied territories.Settlers unleashed a wave of mass violence in a Palestinian village near Ramallah on Friday and carried out mass assaults in at least two villages on Saturday, after Israeli authorities announced that the teenager, Binyamin Achimair, had been found dead .Israeli police said Binyamin, 14, had left a West Bank farming settlement to graze sheep on Friday morning but never returned. Israeli forces found his body on Saturday near the settlement of Malachei HaShalom in the central West Bank.On the second day of unrest erupted in the village near Ramallah, Al Mughayir, an...

For decades, Dr. J. Steve Bynon Jr., a transplant surgeon in Texas, has won national recognition and fame for his work, including helping to enforce professional standards in the country's vast organ transplant system.But officials are now investigating allegations that Dr. Bynon was secretly manipulating a government database to make some of his patients ineligible to receive new livers, potentially depriving them of life-saving treatment.Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, where Dr. Bynon oversaw both liver and kidney transplant programs, abruptly ended those programs last week while it investigated the allegations.On Thursday, the medical center, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Texas, said in a statement that a doctor in its liver transplant progr...

A cable car carrying passengers in a mountainous area of ​​southern Turkey broke down after colliding with part of the metal structure supporting it on Friday, sending its eight terrified occupants plummeting to the rocky slope below.One passenger was killed, seven were injured and nearly 200 others were trapped in other cabins in midair, some overnight and then for hours into Saturday afternoon, as rescuers worked to free them from the paralyzed line.Helicopters, cranes and hundreds of rescue workers were deployed to the area to evacuate a total of 174 people, Turkey's interior minister said. Those affected include children, local residents and foreign tourists who were stranded in cabins, some of them tens of meters above the ground in the Sarisu area of ​​Antalya province, official...