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Long before people develop dementia, they often begin to fall behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined data from Medicare with data from Equifax, the credit agency, to study how people's borrowing behavior has changed in previous years and following the diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a similar disease. I disturb.What they found was surprising: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin to decline dramatically long before their disease is formally identified. One year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2% more likely to have defaulted on mortgage payments than before the onset of the diseas...

As Ukraine's second-largest city prepares for a new Russian offensive, a growing number of NATO allies support Kiev's calls to allow its forces to conduct attacks on Russian territory with Western weapons.President Biden has decided to allow Ukraine to use American weapons against military targets in Russia to blunt the Kharkiv offensive, just days after Canada decided to allow the use of supplied weapons. More than a dozen countries have given similar permission to Ukraine.The United States, Ukraine's largest arms supplier, has been reluctant to take this step, worried about provoking an escalation with Russia that could involve NATO and trigger a wider war. Without Washington's approval, the U.S. Army's Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, can only strike Russian ta...

When OpenAI unveiled the latest version of its wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot this month, it had a new voice that possessed human inflections and emotions. The online demonstration also involved the bot teaching a child to solve a geometry problem.Much to my chagrin, the demo turned out to be essentially a bait and switch. The new ChatGPT was released without most of the new features, including improved voice (which the company told me it has pushed back to make fixes). Even the ability to use a phone camera to get real-time analysis of something like a math problem isn't yet available.Amid the delay, the company also disabled the ChatGPT voice that some said resembled actress Scarlett Johansson, after threatening legal action, replacing it with a different female voice.For now, wha...

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to occupy a sensitive corridor of land in the Gaza Strip along the border with Egypt late last year, Cairo's response was public, explicit and threatening.“It must be strictly underlined that any Israeli move in this direction will lead to a serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations,” the Egyptian government said in a statement in English in January, weeks after Netanyahu announced plans to occupy the area. called the Philadelphia Corridor. Egypt has said an Israeli military presence there would violate the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries.This week, the Israeli army announced that it had taken “tactical control” of the corridor. Yet while the Egyptian government has faced internal pressure to take a toughe...

A third farm worker in the United States has been infected with avian influenza, raising concerns about an outbreak among dairy cattle first identified in March.The worker is the first in this outbreak to have respiratory symptoms, including cough, sore throat and watery eyes, which generally increase the likelihood of transmission to other people, federal officials said Thursday.The other two people only had severe eye infections, probably due to exposure to contaminated milk.All three individuals had direct exposure to dairy cows, and so far none have spread the virus to other people, Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference.This suggests that the virus, called H5N1, has not acquired the ability to spread betwe...

In recent days, Ukraine has conducted a series of drone strikes inside Russia, including one of the longest-range strikes of the war, which targeted radar stations used, at least in part, as early warning systems. nuclear warning from Moscow.Ukraine struck a radar station near the border with Kazakhstan on Monday, more than 1,100 miles away, a Ukrainian intelligence official said. Ukrainian experts said the facility was used to detect missile threats from Asia.On Tuesday morning, the governor of Russia's Krasnodar region reported that a Ukrainian drone was shot down in the sky over the city of Armavir, where two radar stations are located. Ukraine reported no new strikes that day.Ukraine has used its own drones and missiles to carry out these attacks, but they come as officials in Ki...

The website that calls itself Man Stuff News caters to a certain sensibility, with categories like "Backyard Grills," "TV Shows for Kids" and "Beard Grooming." A recent article titled “Tips for Dads During Labor” offers this little piece of advice: “Just remember to spend some time together before deciding whether or not to give birth.”However, by accessing the world news section, the nature of the coverage will change dramatically. There, a recent article played down an international warrant to arrest the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for war crimes. It repeats, word for word, an article that appeared the day before under a different title on the website of RT, Russia's global television network.RT, which the US State Department describes as a key player in the Kremlin'...

While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist unearthed a large terracotta vase, looked inside, and noticed something unexpected: a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The half-meter-tall antiquity, most likely carved during the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt, was a rare find. Known as a male figure walking forward, it is one of only 33 similar statues known, Egyptologists say.But it wasn't long before thieves took possession of the bearded figure and took her on an illicit odyssey that landed her, in 1991, at the Cleveland Museum of Art.On Wednesday, after curators examined extensive evidence of the object's theft from Libya, including photos displayed in the 1940s at a small museum nea...

The chairs of two Senate committees that oversee health policy, concerned that companies are “increasing their profits” at the expense of patients, are examining the practices of a data analytics firm that partners with large insurers to cut payments to providers of health services.The company, MultiPlan, recommends fair payments for medical care, but the company and insurers can collect higher fees when payments are lower. This business model could “give rise to an improper conflict of interest,” the chairmen of the two committees, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, wrote in a letter to the company's CEO published Tuesday.The senators invited MultiPlan to meet with committee staff to discuss a New York Times investigation last month that found the company's pricin...

Senior Ukrainian military officials have warned that Russia is amassing troops near northeastern Ukraine, raising fears that a new offensive push could be imminent in a region that has become a pressure point on strained Ukrainian forces.Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine's commander-in-chief, said Thursday that Moscow was redeploying troops toward Vovchansk and Lyptsi, two villages near the city of Kharkiv that Russian forces have been trying to capture for more than two weeks. Other officials also said Russia had massed troops further north, opposite Ukraine's Sumy region, in preparation for a possible ground offensive there.“These forces are not enough to launch a full-scale offensive and break through our defenses,” General Syrsky wrote on Facebook on Thursday. However, he said, ...