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The latest round of negotiations between Israel and Hamas reached a stalemate on Sunday, as mediators struggled to fill remaining gaps and a Hamas delegation walked out of talks in Cairo, according to two senior Hamas officials and two other officials who they were familiar with interviews. An Israeli official also confirmed that negotiations had stalled and described them as being in "crisis."For months, negotiations aimed at reaching a ceasefire and the release of hostages made little progress, but signs emerged in the last week that the two sides were moving closer to a deal. Israel has backtracked on some of its long-standing demands and a senior Hamas official said the group was studying the latest Israeli offer in a "positive spirit."But the setback over the weekend meant Palestini...

Additional testing of retail dairy products from across the country showed no signs of live avian influenza virus, strengthening the consensus that pasteurization protects consumers from the threat, federal health and safety officials said Wednesday. agriculture at a press conference.But the extent of the avian flu outbreak in cattle remains unclear, as dairy herds are not routinely tested for the infection, scientists and other experts have noted.Only one human infection, a mild one, has been reported on a Texas dairy farm that had direct contact with sick cows. But scientists fear there could be many more undetected infections, particularly among agricultural workers.Just two dozen people have been tested for bird flu, federal officials said at the briefing. There have been no unusual ...

Laurent Cantet, an eminent director who made insightful films about the thorny aspects of French life and society, died on April 25 in Paris. He was 63 years old.His writer and editor, Robin Campillo, said he died of cancer in hospital.Cantet's best-known film was “Entre les Murs” (“The Class”), which won the Palme d'Or, the top prize of the Cannes Film Festival, in 2008 and was nominated for an Oscar as best film in foreign language. “The Class” was something new in French cinema: an extended snapshot of the interior of a school classroom in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, using a former teacher and real-life schoolchildren and walking a provocative line between documentary and fiction.This ambiguity infuses the film with a rare tension, as a hapless language teacher stru...

On Tuesday, Google employees gathered for a collective meeting called TGIF. These company-wide meetings are rarely held on Fridays these days, but the name has stuck.Executives shared highlights from a recent earnings report and a conference on cloud computing and warned workers against taking disruptive actions in the wake of domestic protests against a cloud computing contract with Israel.But no one at the meeting, two employees said, addressed a topic that could have a dramatic impact on Google: its historic antitrust lawsuit with the Justice Department, discussions of which are finally coming to a close this week.For eight months, as tech policy experts tried to guess what a Google victory or defeat would mean for the power of the tech giants in the United States, Google employees mos...

Hamas said Sunday that its armed wing fired rockets at Israeli forces near the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Gaza and Israel. Kan, Israel's public broadcaster, reported that the attack injured several people.The Israeli military said about 10 rockets were fired from an area near the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt towards Kerem Shalom.Kerem Shalom is one of the few crossings through which humanitarian aid can enter the Gaza Strip. After Sunday's attack, the army said it was closed to aid trucks passing through.Israel's Foreign Ministry condemned the attack and said it showed that Hamas was not interested in getting aid into the territory, parts of which, according to a United Nations official, are experiencing "a real famine."The ministry said that while the army...

Robert B. Oxnam, a prominent Chinese scholar who learned through psychotherapy that his years of erratic behavior could be explained by the torment of having multiple personalities, died April 18 at his home in Greenport, N.Y., on the North Fork of Long Island . He was 81 years old.His wife, Vishakha Desai, said the cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease.In the late 1980s, Dr Oxnam was president of the Asia Society, a television commentator and an able sailor. But his psyche was extremely fragile. He had myriad problems, including intermittent anger, bulimia, memory blackouts and depression, but it was for excessive alcohol consumption that he first sought treatment from Dr. Jeffery Smith, a psychiatrist.The first personality to emerge in that therapy was Tommy, an angry b...

Once a powerful local Congolese leader, Linga Iwa Ng'ombe fought against Belgian colonial invaders in the late 19th century.He was such a thorn in his side that Émile Storms, who commanded Belgian troops in the region, predicted that his head would “eventually end up in Brussels with a little label: it wouldn't be out of place in a museum.”This is exactly what happened. Mr Storms' troops killed and beheaded Mr Lusinga in 1884, and his skull ended up in a box at the Brussels-based Institute of Natural Sciences, along with more than 500 human remains taken from former Belgian colonies.His descendants are fighting for the return of his remains, and their efforts take place against the backdrop of a broader debate about Europe's responsibility for colonial atrocities, reparati...

Hundreds of marketers and ad agencies flocked to TikTok's annual sales presentation after a new law put its future in question.

The World Food Program leader said parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a "full-blown famine" that is spreading across the territory after nearly seven months of war that have made aid delivery extremely difficult."There's a famine - a full-blown famine in the north, and it's moving south," Cindy McCain, the program's director, said in excerpts released late Friday from an interview with "Meet The Press." Ms. McCain is the second high-profile American leading a U.S. government or United Nations aid project to say there is famine in northern Gaza, although her remarks do not constitute an official statement, which is a process complex bureaucratic.He did not explain why an official declaration of famine had not been made. But she said her assessment was “based on what we sa...

Some context: A scary trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital in Richmond previously revealed that death rates among children and adolescents increased 18% between 2019 and 2021. Injury-related deaths grew so dramatically that they eclipsed all improvements in terms of public health.The team, seeking to delve deeper into this troubling trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity, and cause for children aged 1 and 19 years old. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children, but the disparities – which had been improving through ...