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Dr. Joel Breman, an infectious disease specialist who was part of the original team that helped fight the Ebola virus in 1976, died April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at age 87.His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who said his father died of complications from kidney cancer.“We were scared to death,” Dr. Breman, recalling his pioneering mission, told a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola epidemic raged that year.Nearly 40 years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They found themselves faced with an unnamed viral infection, the origin of which was unknown, and which was accompanied by high fever and bleeding th...

Opening statements at Trump's trial in ManhattanThe first criminal trial of a former US president began yesterday, with lawyers from both sides presenting divergent views of Donald Trump in their opening statements.Prosecutors have provided a stark account of Trump's sordid past, painting him as a co-conspirator in a plot to cover up three sex scandals that threatened his 2016 election victory and alleging that Trump lied "over and over and over" to protect his candidacy.Trump's lawyers called the case a "breach of corporate records" which it was not, arguing that the 34 crimes Trump faced amounted to "only 34 pieces of paper." They sought to undermine the credibility of key prosecution witnesses, such as Michael Cohen, Trump's former fixer.The day also included brief test...

European Union regulators on Monday threatened to fine TikTok over potentially addictive features on a version of its app called TikTok Lite, which was released to run more smoothly on slower wireless networks.The EU investigation adds to TikTok's regulatory challenges as the US Senate prepares to vote on a bill that would order the app's owner, Chinese internet company ByteDance, to sell TikTok or be banned. The company is under increasing pressure due to its ties to China, data collection practices and potentially harmful effects on children.In Europe, authorities said TikTok had not conducted a legally required risk assessment before introducing features that let users earn rewards such as gift cards for watching videos, liking content and following certain creators. They said...

Israel has provided no evidence to support its allegations that many employees of the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees are members of terrorist organizations, according to an independent study commissioned by the United Nations and published on Monday.The review did not address Israel's allegations that a dozen employees of the agency, known as UNRWA, were involved in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on October 7. “It is a separate mission and does not fall within our mandate.” said Catherine Colonna, the former French foreign minister who led the investigation.The review was announced in January, before Israel released claims that one in 10 of UNRWA's 13,000 employees in the Gaza Strip were members of Hamas or its ally, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that some of those...

Lori and George Schappell, conjoined twins whose skulls were partially fused but who managed to lead independent lives, died April 7 in Philadelphia. There were 62 of them.Their deaths, which occurred in hospital, were announced by a funeral home, which cited no cause.Dr. Christopher Moir, a professor of surgery at the Mayo Clinic, who was part of teams that separated six pairs of conjoined twins - although none of them were joined at the head - said that when one of the Schappells died, the other would have to almost certainly followed quickly.“Conjoined twins share circulation,” he said, “so unless you somehow emergently split their connection, it's absolutely a fatal process and not viable.”The Schappells lived much longer than expected when they were born as craniopagus twins, joi...

Huw Edwards, one of the BBC's most high-profile hosts who was suspended last year over allegations he paid for explicit images, resigned from the broadcaster on Monday.Mr Edwards, 62, led the BBC's coverage of major national events, including the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. He started as a trainee in 1984 and by the end of his career was the regular presenter of "BBC News at Ten".He was suspended by the BBC in July after tabloid The Sun reported that an unnamed host at the station had paid a teenager $45,000 for sexually explicit images, starting when the person was 17. Mr. Edwards' wife later publicly identified her husband as the host. in the report. The age of consent in Britain is 16, but sharing or possessing indecent images of anyone under 18 is a crime.La...

A new wave of AI-created child pornography threatens to overwhelm authorities already held back by antiquated technology and laws, according to a new report released Monday by Stanford University's Internet Observatory.Over the past year, new artificial intelligence technologies have made it easier for criminals to create explicit images of children. Now, Stanford researchers warn that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit that serves as the central coordinating agency and receives the majority of its funding from the federal government, lacks the resources to combat the growing threat .The organization's CyberTipline, created in 1998, is the federal clearinghouse for all online reports of child pornography, or CSAM, and is used by law enforcement to ...

Israeli authorities said they arrested two men on Monday in Jerusalem after a vehicle was used to ram pedestrians, injuring at least three people, in what police called a terrorist attack.video of the episode broadcast on Israel's Channel 12 shows a car speeding around a sharp bend and colliding with a group of people, who fly over the roof of the vehicle. Images Data shared on social media by police shows a white sedan had crashed into another car on a small street.According to the video, after hitting pedestrians, the vehicle appears to have crashed into a parked car. Two young people then ran into the street, pointing weapons, before fleeing the area.Police said the two men were arrested at a nearby store that was closed and that the weapon used in the attack had been recovered.It ...

Nei suoi tre decenni di lavoro con gli elefanti marini, la dottoressa Marcela Uhart non aveva mai visto nulla di simile sulla scena avvenuta lo scorso ottobre sulle spiagge della penisola argentina di Valdés.Era l'alta stagione riproduttiva; la spiaggia avrebbe dovuto pullulare di harem di femmine fertili e di maschi enormi in lotta tra loro per il dominio. Si trattava invece di “carcasse su carcasse su carcasse”, ha ricordato il dottor Uhart, che dirige il programma sanitario per la fauna selvatica dell’America Latina presso l’Università della California, a Davis.L'H5N1, uno dei tanti virus che causano l'influenza aviaria, aveva già ucciso almeno 24.000 leoni marini sudamericani lungo le coste del continente in meno di un anno. Ora era arrivato per gli elefanti marini.I cuc...

Wesselman-Pierce lived with her husband, Vince Pierce, and her two children. “I didn't want to lose our friendship, no matter what,” a tearful Wesselman-Pierce told Schulman in the film. “Many of the personalities that emerged were just fragments of myself.”At the end of the documentary, a brooding Pierce recalled a story he'd heard and, in turn, gave the film — and the expression — his name. Cod, he said, was once shipped in vats from Alaska to China, but the fish arrived soft and tasteless. Catfish were eventually added to the tanks to keep the cod healthy. “There are those people who are catfish in life,” he said. In his mind, his wife was one of them. “They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.”Life, he added, would be "boring and monotonous if ...