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Israeli forces appear to be closing in on the center of Rafah city, according to satellite images, which show military vehicles and widespread destruction of neighborhoods more than two and a half miles into Gaza from the Israeli border, as well as Palestinians fleeing the cities even outside the areas the Israeli army said to evacuate.Israeli troops are still in the eastern part of the city in southern Gaza, according to images captured on Wednesday by commercial satellite company Planet Labs. But in recent days they have continued to move towards central Rafah, passing the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the Salah al-Din road, Gaza's main artery.Collapsed buildings and debris are visible throughout this neighborhood, where only limited damage was visible before Israel began its...

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved an innovative new treatment for patients with a form of lung cancer. It should only be used by patients who have exhausted all other options for treating small cell lung cancer and who have a life expectancy of four to five months.The drug tarlatamab, or Imdelltra, produced by the Amgen company, tripled the life expectancy of patients, guaranteeing them an average survival of 14 months after taking the drug. Forty percent of those who received the drug responded.After decades without real progress in treatments for small cell lung cancer, tarlatamab offers the first real hope, said Dr. Anish Thomas, a lung cancer specialist at the federal National Cancer Institute who was not involved in the study.“I feel like it's a light after a...

For the government that accused him, he was a “lone wolf,” an out-of-control individual who represented nothing but himself when he fired at least four bullets into Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico.Wednesday's attack, however, highlighted a much larger collective malfunction in Slovakia. In this central European country, society and political culture are so bitterly divided that the violence attributed to a man who authorities say acted alone has become yet another club with which each side can beat the other.“There is a level of polarization that has never existed before in this country,” said Daniel Milo, a former government official responsible for monitoring disinformation who now works for a technology company. "I've never seen anything like it," he added.The Covid-...

Robert H. Dennard, an engineer who invented the silicon memory technology that plays an indispensable role in every smartphone, laptop and tablet, died April 23 in Sleepy Hollow, New York. At the age of 91.The cause of death, at the hospital, was a bacterial infection, said his daughter, Holly Dennard.Dennard's pioneering work began at IBM in the 1960s, when equipment to store and archive computer data was expensive, bulky (often machines the size of a room), and slow. He was studying the emerging field of microelectronics, which used silicon-based transistors to store digital bits of information.In 1966, Dennard invented a way to store a digital bit on a transistor: a technology called dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, which holds information like an electrical charge that slow...

The US military anchored a temporary pier on Gaza's coast on Thursday, creating an entry point for humanitarian aid for the enclave, where the flow of supplies across land borders has largely stopped since Israel began its his foray into Rafah last week.The aid will be loaded onto trucks that will begin disembarking "in the coming days," US Central Command said in a statement Thursday morning. US officials said last week that the floating dock and causeway had been completed, but that weather conditions had delayed their installation.Israel has long opposed a seaport for Gaza, saying it would pose a security threat. As the humanitarian crisis in the territory has soared in recent months, with acute shortages of food, medicine and other essentials, the U.S. military in March announced...

With Pride events scheduled around the world in the coming weeks, U.S. officials are preparing for a return of monkeypox, the infectious disease formerly called monkeypox that has affected tens of thousands of gay and bisexual men around the world in 2022. A combination of behavioral changes and vaccination quelled the epidemic, but the majority of people at risk have not yet been vaccinated.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday of a deadlier version of the disease ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo and urged people at risk to get vaccinated as soon as possible. So far, no cases of this subtype have been identified outside Africa. But the escalating outbreak in Congo still poses a global threat, just as infections in Nigeria sparked the 2022 outbreak, expe...

Calls are growing in Slovakia for political parties to suspend campaigning for the European Union elections, just three weeks away, in the wake of the attack on the prime minister in the highly polarized country.Slovakia's president-elect, Peter Pellegrini, and others say the step is necessary to avoid further incendiary political speech, which has further escalated since the shooting that left Prime Minister Robert Fico seriously injured. At least one party, the opposition Progress Slovakia party, said it would suspend its campaign immediately, to help "end the spiral of attacks and blame."Local media reported that another party, the Christian Democratic Movement, had also suspended its election campaign.It is unclear how long such suspensions would last or what it would mean for Slo...

European Union regulators on Thursday opened an investigation into American tech giant Meta over the potentially addictive effects Instagram and Facebook have on children, an action with far-reaching implications because it cuts to the core of how they are designed the company's products.Meta products could "exploit the weaknesses and inexperience of minors" to create behavioral addictions that threaten their mental well-being, the European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-member bloc, said in a statement. EU regulators could eventually fine Meta up to 6% of its global revenue, which last year amounted to $135 billion, as well as impose other product changes.The investigations are part of a growing effort by governments around the world to rein in services like Instagram and...

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken warned on Wednesday that recent successes in providing desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza Strip risk being undone by fighting in southern Gaza.The border crossing in the southern city of Rafah has been closed since Israel began what it describes as a limited military operation against Hamas fighters in the city, on the border with Egypt. The United Nations said on Wednesday that 600,000 people had fled Rafah since Israel's ground assault began there.“Just as Israel was taking important and badly needed steps to improve the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” Blinken told reporters in Kiev, Ukraine, “we saw a negative impact on the fact that we have this active, very active conflict in the Rafah area".Josep Borrell Fonte...

The Biden administration, under intense pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding from a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the center of theories that Covid would have leaked from a laboratory.The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, came on the heels of a fiery congressional hearing this month in which lawmakers attacked the group's president for allegedly misrepresenting its work with virologists in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. Republicans went further, demanding that Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, be criminally investigated.For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wild animal viruses, the...