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Central Tehran is ablaze this week with posters and billboards for the six candidates in Friday’s presidential election, and the streets are packed with buses carrying supporters to campaign rallies, but it’s hard to muster any enthusiasm for voting, much less for any individual candidate.Iranians will go to the polls in a special election to choose the successor to former president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.The election comes at a critical time for Iran’s leadership. The economy has been weakened by years of sanctions, and under Raisi’s ultraconservative leadership, personal freedoms and expressions of dissent have been increasingly repressed. Yet the government is eager to persuade more Iranians to show up to the polls in large numbers because voter turnout is ...

The Supreme Court appears poised to temporarily allow emergency abortions in Idaho when a woman's health is at risk, according to a copy of what appeared to be the opinion that appeared briefly Wednesday on the court's website.The unsigned opinion dismissed the case on procedural grounds, saying the court would not, for now, address the merits of the dispute, according to the 22-page document, published by Bloomberg News. Such a decision would reinstate a lower federal court ruling that had suspended Idaho's near-total abortion ban and said the state's hospitals could perform emergency abortions if necessary to protect the mother's health.The case centers on whether a federal law requiring emergency care for any patient trumps Idaho's strict abortion ban, which bar...

In his nearly 15 months in Moscow's infamous Lefortovo prison, Evan Gershkovich explored Russian literary classics like "War and Peace" and played chess slowly by mail with his father in the United States. He tries to stay fit during the hour of exercise he is allowed each day.Friends who correspond with him describe Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, as positive, strong and rarely discouraged, despite facing the official wrath of President Vladimir V. Putin's Russia.“He may have ups and downs like everyone else, but he remains confident in himself, in his rightness,” said Maria Borzunova, a Russian journalist and friend of Mr. Gershkovich.Mr. Gershkovich went on trial Wednesday, facing up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. Stat...

The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory Wednesday, rejecting a Republican challenge that sought to block the government from reaching out to social media platforms to combat what it said was misinformation.The court ruled that the states and users who had objected to such interactions had not suffered the kind of direct harm that gave them the right to sue.The decision, by a vote of 6 to 3, left for another day fundamental questions about what limits the First Amendment places on the government's power to influence technology companies that are the primary gatekeepers of information in the Internet age .The case arose from a flurry of communications from administration officials urging the platforms to remove posts on topics such as the coronavirus v...

Tuesday's ruling by Israel's Supreme Court ending a decades-long exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews from the country's military service could herald a seismic shift in the country's trajectory, with social, political and security implications.The ruling will likely further test Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's fragile governing coalition, which depends on the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that support the exemption, even as Israel is at war in Gaza.The issue of the ultra-Orthodox exemption has long polarized a country where most Jewish 18-year-olds, both men and women, are conscripted for years of compulsory service. Mainstream Israelis have long chafed at the lack of equality.More recently, the months-long war in Gaza and looming conflicts on other fronts ha...

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, called on a government watchdog to investigate why insurance companies continue to charge women for birth control, a move that brought access to contraceptives back into the spotlight.In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, the senator noted that insurance companies are charging Americans for contraceptives that, under federal law, should be free — and that they are also denying appeals from consumers seeking to have their contraceptives covered. Some experts estimate that such practices could affect access to birth control for millions of women.Since 2012, the Affordable Care Act has required that private insurance plans cover the “full range” of Food and Drug Administration-approved contr...

NATO will offer Ukraine a new headquarters to manage its military assistance at the upcoming 75th anniversary summit in Washington, officials said, a pledge of the alliance's long-term commitment to the country's security that it was heralded as a "bridge" to Kiev's eventual membership. .Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, along with some Central European nations, fervently hoped that his country would be offered membership negotiations by NATO. at the summit, which will take place July 9-11.Instead, the alliance will announce that it has agreed to set up a mission in Germany to coordinate long-term aid of all kinds to Ukraine, American and NATO officials said. The move is intended to send a strong signal of allied commitment, both in Kiev and in Moscow, which hopes the ...

The task was clear: test how well the AI ​​could plan a trip to Norway, a place I had never been. So I didn't do any of my usual obsessive online research and instead asked three AI planners to create a four-day itinerary. None of them, alas, mentioned saunas or salmon.Two assistants, however, were eager to learn more about me to adapt their initially generic recommendations, which they had given out in a matter of seconds. Vacay, a personalized travel planning tool, presented me with a list of questions, while Mindtrip, a new AI-powered travel assistant, invited me to take a quiz. (ChatGPT, the third assistant, didn't ask anything.)The questions from Vacay and Mindtrip were similar: Are you traveling alone? What is your budget? Do you prefer hotels or Airbnb? Would you rath...

Israeli Prime Minister says war in Gaza will soon enter new phase“The intense phase of the war with Hamas is coming to an end,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a television interview on Sunday. “This does not mean that the war is coming to an end, but that the war in its intense phase is coming to an end.”But whatever relief those comments may bring after more than six months of horrific bloodshed, Mr. Netanyahu was quick to make two things clear: A ceasefire in Gaza is not imminent. And the next clash could be in Lebanon, with the forces of Hamas’s ally, Hezbollah.After recalling troops to Gaza, he said: “We will be able to move some of our forces north.”Netanyahu stopped well short of announcing an invasion of Lebanon, a move that would likely result in heavy losses for Israel...

Federal health officials have warned that the risk of contracting dengue in the United States has increased this year, a worrying sign as global cases of the mosquito-borne disease have reached record numbers.In the first half of this year, countries in the Americas reported twice as many cases as in all of 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an advisory to health professionals on Thursday.The region has recorded nearly 10 million virus cases so far in 2024, most of which originated from outbreaks in South American countries such as Brazil and Argentina.While local transmission of the virus in the continental United States has been limited, Puerto Rico, classified as having “frequent or continuous” risk, declared a public health emergency in March and reported near...