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Could this be the year, as President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised, that Russia's war with Ukraine will end?The possibility of peace brings “tears to my eyes,” said Valeria, 30, an English teacher from eastern Ukraine.As Trump prepares to return to the White House on Monday, he promises peace in Ukraine but publicly offers no strategy for how to achieve it, other than his stated desire to meet with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. So Ukrainians can only imagine what the next few months will bring.No one, Valeria said, wants peace more than the Ukrainians. But having suffered so many losses, with hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, Ukrainians will not accept peace at any price, he said. She asked that her last name not be used out of fear for the safety of her father, who still...

But I've never added a friend on TikTok, sent a direct message, or thought of myself as a “TikToker.” And I don't think I'm alone. For most people I know, TikTok is not a place to connect with other people. It's a place to waste time, numb yourself, unplug from reality, and float through your feed. That passive, dissociative quality, while great for engagement, has also made TikTok feel more replaceable than other social networks. If it disappears, we will find our solution somewhere else.I am also convinced by the explanation given in The Atlantic by Hana Kiros, according to which TikTok is a victim of its own success. TikTok's popularity, he argues, has led many other social networks to copy its features. Now, users looking to dive into an endless wormhole of short, funny vertical videos...

When Hamas led the October 7, 2023 incursions into Israel, killing around 1,200 people, around 250 people were taken in Gaza as hostages, including citizens of Israel, the United States, Britain, Mexico, Thailand and other countries.Among the prisoners were the bodies of 37 people killed in the attack, Israeli officials said. Now, about 100 hostages, dead and alive, are still held in the enclave, officials say.The ceasefire agreement announced Wednesday between Israel and Hamas will begin with an initial phase lasting six weeks and will result in the release of 33 hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The agreement calls for Hamas to release three female hostages on day one, four more on day 7 and 26 more over the next five weeks, according to a copy of the document obtained by T...

While Kennedy's adoption of salvage farms may be new, the concept dates back nearly a century. In 1935, the government opened the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to research and treat addiction. Over the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who described the institution in his novel "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict"). The program had high relapse rates and was contaminated by pharmacological experiments on human subjects. In 1975, as local treatment centers began to proliferate across the country, the program was shut down.In America, therapeutic communities for addiction treatment became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like Synanon, have become notorious for abusive and cult-like environments. There are now perhaps 3,000 arou...

Loud explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, early Saturday morning as authorities warned of incoming ballistic missiles.An air raid warning had just ended when at 5.50am local time booms were heard throughout the city. Seconds later, air raid sirens began to sound.The country's air defense systems are working, the city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, wrote on Telegram, warning of the missile threat and urging residents to stay in shelters.Shortly after, he said emergency services were responding to the fire scene. The city's regional military administration said four people were killed.Both sides in the nearly three-year war, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks.This is a developing story.

Less than six months after rolling out a slew of AI features, Apple is disabling one of its signature features: news notification aggregation and summarization.The company revealed the change Thursday in a software update for developers. This followed an outcry from the British media that Apple software was misrepresenting the news.In December, the BBC was among the first to urge Apple to change its software. The call came after the BBC sent readers a notification about Luigi Mangione, the man arrested for the murder of Brian Thompson, the health insurance executive, in New York City. Some iPhones summarized BBC news by saying: “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” He hadn't.In addition to disabling news summaries, Apple said it will add a warning for users who have opted in to receive notifica...

Follow real-time updates on the deal for a ceasefire in Gaza.It's almost over, the end is so close that they can practically feel the keys they've held onto all these months sliding into the locks of their old homes, the doorknobs turning in their hands, the beds they'll sink into to peaceful rest. of the first night in which more than 15 months – their own beds. Only a couple of days left.Two nights before the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza was announced, Layan al-Mohtaseb, 15, dreamed of being back in his bedroom in Gaza City, cleaning it like he did before his family fled during the war.“This time, it feels like we are really coming home,” he said.This may only be true for those whose homes are still standing after months of destruction. And there is always the possibility that fi...

When the letter arrived in Westil Gonzalez's prison cell saying he had been granted parole, he couldn't read it. Over the 33 years he had been locked up for murder, multiple sclerosis had taken away much of his sight and left him wheelchair-dependent.He had a clear idea of ​​what he would do once he was freed. “I want to give my testimony to a couple of young people who are out there, collecting guns,” Mr. Gonzalez, 57, said in a recent interview. “I want to save one person from what I went through.”But six months have passed and Mr. Gonzalez is still incarcerated outside Buffalo because the Department of Corrections has not found a halfway house that will accept him. Another New York inmate has been in the same limbo for 20 months. Others were released only after suing the state.America's...

The British government bowed to pressure on Thursday and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech tycoon, used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of vitriolic posts.Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” which would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.He also said the Government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs, groups of men found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11, in the UK . 2000s and early 2010s. Most of t...

President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering an executive order to allow TikTok to continue operating despite a pending legal ban until new owners are found, according to a person familiar with the matter.The possible executive order, previously reported by the Washington Post, is under discussion as TikTok expires on Sunday to be banned in the United States unless it finds a new owner. The popular video sharing app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Republicans have said for years that they view the app, downloaded on millions of smartphones, as a national security risk. It has become a rare issue that has united both parties in Congress.If the Supreme Court upholds the law, which will ban the app unless ByteDance sells it to a non-Chinese company, special treatment from Trump co...