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Ryan Salame, a top executive at collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on Tuesday, making him the first of Sam Bankman-Fried's circle of advisors at FTX to receive a prison sentence.Salame, 30, a trusted lieutenant of Bankman-Fried, the exchange's founder, pleaded guilty last year to violating campaign finance law and a charge of operating a money transfer business without license. He is one of four top deputies in the FTX empire who have pleaded guilty to crimes since the company imploded in November 2022.Mr. Salame's sentence exceeded the five to seven years recommended by prosecutors. Defense lawyers had asked for 18 months.Wearing a blue suit and socks emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo, Salame stood before Judge Lewis A. Ka...

Gaza officials said at least 21 people were killed and dozens injured Tuesday in an attack that hit a tent camp housing displaced people in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area in southern Gaza where Israel has designated a safe zone since humanitarian point of view.The Israeli army immediately denied carrying out attacks inside the area. Videos verified by the Times show several people dead and injured in an agricultural area of ​​Al-Mawasi, where civilians had taken refuge near the area.Dr Mohammed Al Moghayer, a senior official with the Palestinian Civil Defense emergency relief organisation, said most of the dead and wounded were taken to nearby field hospitals and others to Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis. Dr Moghayer and the Gaza Ministry of Health said that in addition to those ki...

In more than a dozen states, doctors and nurses have resorted to paper, handwritten treatment orders to track patients' illnesses and monitor them, unable to access the detailed medical histories that have long been available only through computerized records.Patients have waited long periods in emergency rooms and their treatments have been delayed as lab results and readings from machines like MRIs are ferried through makeshift efforts lacking the speed of electronic uploads.For more than two weeks, thousands of medical staff have switched to manual methods after a cyber attack on Ascension, one of the nation's largest health systems with about 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia.The large-scale attack on May 8 was eerily reminiscent of the hack of Change Heal...

Shein, the online retail giant founded in China, had big ambitions to go public in New York. But as relations between Washington and Beijing soured, the ultra-fast fashion company began taking a closer look at a backup plan across the Atlantic.The company will now focus more on the London Stock Exchange for its initial public offering, according to two people familiar with the matter. This may not have been the company's initial choice, but it would be a major victory for Britain, which has been wary of its capital losing its status as a global financial centre.Jeremy Hunt, Britain's top financial official, reportedly courted Shein, anticipating that a major IPO would strengthen London's position as one of the world's leading financial centers. A Shein spokesperson decli...

OpenAI said Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model that will succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.The San Francisco start-up, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring "the next level of capability" as it strives to build "artificial general intelligence" , or AGI. , a machine that can do everything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for artificial intelligence products including chatbots, digital assistants similar to Apple's Siri, search engines and image generators.OpenAI also said it is creating a new safety and security committee to explore how to manage the risks posed by the new model and futur...

Iraqis have known the bitter taste of war so intimately and frequently over the past 40 years that they say they can viscerally feel the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. They remember the dreaded hiss of a bomb before impact, the fear of a knock on the door bringing the news of the loss of a loved one, the stench of blood drying on concrete.This has been the daily life of many Iraqis for years, as the rebel struggle against the American occupation and the civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims brought destruction and death to their neighborhoods, destroyed families and left behind countless widows and orphans.Initially those memories pushed thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets of Iraqi cities to show their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. But as the war in Gaza h...

For the first time in history, cannabis has surpassed alcohol as Americans' daily drug of choice.In 2022 there were 17.7 million people who reported using cannabis every day or almost every day, compared to 14.7 million who reported using alcohol with the same frequency, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Addiction that analyzed data from the United States. National survey on drug use and health.Although many more people drink than use cannabis, frequent use has become slightly less common than it was about 15 years ago, the study found. But the percentage of people in the United States who frequently use cannabis increased 15-fold in the three decades after 1992, when daily cannabis use hit its lowest point.The legalization of cannabis has also accelerated rapid...

Simon Cheng is still visibly tense when describing his detention in China. In 2019, Mr Cheng, a pro-democracy activist from Hong Kong and former employee of the British consulate there, was arrested after a business trip to mainland China.For 15 days he was interrogated and tortured, according to his account. Beijing confirmed his detention but denied that he had suffered mistreatment. When he was finally released, he no longer felt safe in Hong Kong and in early 2020 he fled to Britain and claimed asylum.“In some ways it's not difficult to adjust to a new life in the UK,” said Mr Cheng, 33. "But at the same time I can't abandon the fate of my hometown."His activism – and China's pursuit of him – didn't stop once he moved to London. Last year, Hong Kong authorities pla...

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI said Sunday it has raised $6 billion, helping close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other rivals in the red-hot sector.The funds would be used "to bring xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies," the company said in a statement.Musk, who founded xAI in July, said in a social media post that the funding round valued the company at $18 billion, not including new money. Investors included Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.Investors and big tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions into companies developing artificial intelligence ...