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As Western diplomats explore the possibility of establishing ties with the rebels who have seized power in Syria, a religious minority has led its own diplomatic push to ensure protection for its members as the country rebuilds.A representative of the group, the Druze, recently traveled to Washington to meet with lawmakers, members of the Biden and Trump administrations and diplomats to plead their case.“We are very worried about the future,” Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif said in an interview in Washington, where he urged US officials to prioritize the protection of Syria's 1.2 million Druze as part of their engagement with the new government of village.In December, after a long civil war, a coalition of Syrian rebels overthrew President Bashar al-Assad and established an interim government. The re...

To overcome this problem, one of the major projects funded by HEAL focuses on studying the nervous systems of people with chronic pain more directly, in part by recovering malfunctioning dorsal root ganglia and trigeminal nerves from patients undergoing surgery for chronic pain, as well as from cadaver donors. . These samples are then cultured and examined using a range of new technologies – things like proteomics, spatial transcriptomics and metabolomics – to see how they differ from normal tissue. The goal, Gereau explained, is to identify what changes occur at the cellular level when pain becomes chronic and to create an atlas of those mechanisms and variations. Understanding this, he added, would eventually open the door to precision medicine, in which drugs could be designed to specif...

Struggling to raise funds to restore his cathedral's ancient organ, a priest from St.-Flour, a small town in the heart of France, found a creative solution. He transformed one of the bell towers into a curing laboratory where farmers could hang their hams to dry.For nearly two years, after being blessed by a local bishop, the pork legs swayed peacefully in the dry air of the cathedral's north tower, bringing in much-needed funds and delighting charcuterie lovers. Then an inspector from the body that supervises the French architectural heritage intervened.After noting a grease stain on the floor of the bell tower, among other infractions, the inspector ordered the removal of the hams. They posed a fire hazard, cathedral officials said in a December 2023 report. When the cathedral refused to...

Paulette Lifton woke up Tuesday morning on her 67th birthday in a panic as smoke billowed in the distance from her home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first person he called was his sister Annette."What's going on?" Mrs. Lifton asked.“You need to download the Watch Duty app,” his sister replied.Ms. Lifton did just that, tracking the fire's spread through map and app updates while packing her car with her most prized possessions: her favorite sequin jacket; her dogs, King Charles spaniels, Elle and Sansa; and the two Emmys she won as a television and film sound editor.For Ms. Lifton and thousands of other Los Angeles residents, Watch Duty has become a lifeline in monitoring the multiple fires burning across the city. In a country of nearly 10 million people, word of t...

On Saturday, in his first official visit to Syria to meet the new government, the Lebanese prime minister asked the two countries for a way to allow the masses of Syrian refugees in Lebanon to return home.Prime Minister Najib Mikati met Saturday afternoon in the Syrian capital Damascus with Ahmad al-Shara, the leader of the new Syrian government, according to the Lebanese prime minister's office. Al-Shara leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic group that spearheaded the flash offensive that toppled the decades-long rule of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president, last month.At a news conference in Damascus, Mikati said both countries should quickly resolve the issue of the more than one million refugees Lebanon has welcomed following the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. While s...

James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-backed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the deaths of three people in a sweat lodge in 2009, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he led in the Arizona desert , died January 11, 2009. 3 in Henderson, Nevada. He was 67 years old.His brother Jon Ray announced his death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but said the death was unexpected.Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne. The “secret,” espoused by Ray and others, was the idea that positive thinking can literally make the world change in your favor.Things began to move quickly for Mr. Ray. He ap...

Mauro Morandi, whose 32-year stay on an uninhabited Mediterranean island led him to be known as Italy's Robinson Crusoe, died Jan. 3 in Modena, Italy. He was 85 years old.The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said Antonio Rinaldis, who wrote a book with Morandi in 2023 about his life on the island.Unlike Daniel Defoe's hero, who was shipwrecked and fervently hoped to be rescued, Morandi chose his life of solitude.He said he fell in love at first sight with Budelli, a pristine, undeveloped island off the northern tip of Sardinia. He arrived in 1989, a bit by chance, he said in interviews. He left – against his will – in 2021, writing on social media that he was tired of “fighting against those who want to send me away”.Morandi's singular choice to live in solitude has given rise to at least two...

Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thoughts small.Last month, Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, reached out to some of its top political, communications executives and others to discuss the company's approach to online discourse. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn these changes into policy.Over the next few weeks, Zuckerberg and his select team discussed how to do this in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates slipped away from family dinners and holiday gatherings for work, while Mr. Zuckerberg took stock between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and on the island of Kauai.By New Year's Day, Mr....

Israeli fighter jets bombed ports and a power plant in Houthi-controlled Yemeni territory on Friday, the Israeli military said, in the latest attempt to force the Iran-backed militant group to stop firing at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea.Israel has stepped up its attacks against the Houthis in recent weeks in response to repeated attacks by the Yemeni militia, which has fired at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.The United States and Britain have also repeatedly struck Yemen in an effort to protect international waterways from Houthi attacks. But it was far from clear whether Israel and its allies would succeed in forcing the Houthis to end their attacks through a bombing campaign.The Israeli air force bombed the Hezyaz power plant near Sana - the Houthi-controlled capit...

Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken, award-winning television news producer whose career was ultimately derailed by the ravages of multiple sclerosis, which he wrote about in a best-selling memoir, died Dec. 24 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a village in Westchester county. He was 76 years old.His wife, former "Today" host Meredith Vieira, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by acute respiratory failure.Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news business, working with luminaries such as Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But he took on a different topic when he wrote a memoir — and articles for HuffPost, The New York Times and other media — about managing MS, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.Mr. Cohen was diagnosed with MS in 1973, when he was 25...