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Hamas said on Friday it will release four female soldiers held hostage for more than a year in Gaza as part of a hostage-for-prisoner swap that will take place on Saturday, as Israelis and Palestinians anxiously await the next steps in the deal.In a statement, Hamas named the four women, who were abducted from a military base near Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023 that kicked off the war. Israel said mediators between the two sides forwarded a list of names of hostages scheduled for release on Saturday, without confirming their identities.Mediators hope the six-week truce between Israel and Hamas, which began Sunday, could lay the groundwork for a permanent end to the war in Gaza. But next weekend could prove a crucial test for the deal.Under the terms of the deal, Israel...

Robert F.Kennedy Jr. He has often oriented his criticisms of vaccines on a common ingredient: aluminum, which according to him is responsible for a series of childhood disorders, including food allergies, autism and depression."You wonder why a whole generation of children is allergic to things," said Mr. Kennedy during an interview from 2021. "It is because we induce allergies, filling them with aluminum."For many scientists specialized in vaccines, aluminum is a strange target. It is among the most studied ingredients in vaccines and perhaps in modern medicine."There is a huge amount of information collected," said Dr. Andrew Racine, pediatrician and medical director of Montefiore Health System. "If there was something that jumps to the eye about the lack of security, most likely we woul...

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....