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Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose film scandalized, fascinated and entertained France of the 70s and 80s with their sometimes brutal projections of the sexual imagination of French men, died on Monday in his home in Paris. He was 85 years old.His death was confirmed by his son Léonard Blier.For two decades Bliers was one of the most decorated French directors, winning the first prize in Cannes, an Academy Award for best foreign film for "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs", released in 1978, and numerous Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscar .In a statement after his death, President Emmanuel Macron greeted Bliers (Blee-Ay pronounced) as a "French cinema giant, who marked our national imagination for fifty years with his free and pungent touch".Blier launched the career of men and w...

Two years ago, OpenAI kicked off the chatbot craze with the release of ChatGPT. Now it hopes to spark interest in a new wave of AI technology.On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a tool called Operator that can go on the Internet and perform tasks autonomously, such as grocery shopping or restaurant reservations.“It can navigate websites and perform actions on websites, just like you and I do,” Yash Kumar, OpenAI head of product and engineering, said in an interview.Artificial intelligence researchers call this type of technology an AI agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can use other software on the Internet.During a briefing with The New York Times, Kumar showed how the system could make reservations at a San Francisco restaurant through the OpenTa...

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told President Trump on Wednesday that the kingdom plans to increase its investment and trade with the United States by at least $600 billion over the next four years, according to the official Saudi Press Agency .The crown prince, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, told Trump that his new administration has the ability to create "unprecedented economic prosperity" in the United States and that the kingdom wants to participate, the Saudi Press Agency said . he said.There was no immediate confirmation of the call from the White House. Trump has promised to accelerate investment in the United States, particularly to help revive manufacturing. On the campaign trail last year, he said he would use a mix of tax cuts and tariffs to force companies to ...

The Trump administration, moving quickly to crack down on health and science agencies, canceled a series of scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including upcoming reports focused on the nation's growing avian flu crisis .Experts serving on external advisory groups on a range of topics from antibiotic resistance to deafness received emails on Wednesday saying their meetings had been cancelled.The cancellations follow a directive issued Tuesday by the acting director of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which prohibited the public dissemination of any public communications until reviewed by a presidential appointee or designee, according to federal officials and an internal memo reviewed by The New York Ti...

Prince Harry has presented himself as "the last person" who could hold British tabloids to account for years of predatory conduct during the wiretapping scandal. On Wednesday he settled for a partial victory in his lone campaign.Harry settled a long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers over illegal intelligence gathering, winning a multimillion-pound payout and, perhaps most significantly, admitting to "unlawful" conduct by hired private investigators from The Sun, the company's flagship tabloid.But the settlement averted what could have been weeks of damaging testimony about phone hacking and other illegal practices used by News Group to ferret out personal information about Harry and other prominent figures more than a decade ago. Harry, who failed to appear in cou...

President Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug market and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian world.In doing so, Trump fulfilled a promise he made several times during the campaign, soliciting political contributions from the cryptocurrency industry, which spent more than $100 million to influence the outcome of the election. A Bitcoin pioneer, Mr. Ulbricht, 40, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015, after being found guilty of charges that included distributing narcotics over the Internet.“I just called Ross William Ulbright's mother to let her know,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht's name and referring to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New Yo...

Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi announced Tuesday that he would resign in early March, citing in part the failure of the army under his command to protect Israelis from Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023.The heavy toll from the attacks – 1,200 dead in Israel and another 250 taken hostage in Gaza – had long come with expectations in Israel that at least some of the country's leaders would eventually step down. Only a few officials have done so, and General Halevi is the highest-ranking military leader to resign so far.“My responsibility for the terrible failure accompanies me every day, every hour and every will for the rest of my life,” he said in a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, announcing the h...

President Trump moved quickly to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization on Monday, a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation's position as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic.In an executive order issued about eight hours after he was sworn in, Trump cited a number of reasons for the withdrawal, including the WHO's "mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic" and "failure to urgently adopt reforms necessary." .” He said the agency demands “unfairly burdensome payments” from the United States and complained that China pays less.The move was not unexpected. Trump has been railing against the WHO since 2020, when he attacked the agency for its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and threatened to withhold U.S. funding....

A fire swept through a 12-story hotel at a ski resort in Turkey on Tuesday, killing at least 76 people and injuring 51 others, authorities said, turning an idyllic vacation spot into a smoke-filled nightmare.The disaster occurred during the winter holidays in Türkiye, when children do not go to school and many families go on holiday, including to ski resorts. It is unclear how many children were among the dead, but some were reported by acquaintances.The cause of the fire was unclear.Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said on social media that six prosecutors had been assigned to investigate the fire. Nine people, including the hotel owner, had been arrested.The fire broke out before dawn at the Grand Kartal Hotel in Kartalkaya, 180 miles east of Istanbul, sending large flames from the windows a...

President Trump signed an executive order Monday to delay enforcement of the federal TikTok ban for 75 days, though the law took effect Sunday and it's unclear whether such a move would prevail over it.The order, one of Trump's first acts after taking office, instructs the attorney general to take no action to enforce the law so that his administration will have "the opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action to follow ". The order is retroactive to Sunday.As he signed the order, Trump told reporters that "the United States should have the right to get half of TikTok" if a deal is reached for the app, without going into detail. He said he thought TikTok could be worth a trillion dollars.The order could immediately face legal challenges, including over whether a president has...