Güncel

The shop sold flowers and gardening tools to visitors coming right from the street, where a small breakaway region of Moldova has remained defiantly for more than 30 years, with the support of Russian troops.After the gas supply from Russia was blocked on New Year's Day, however, the shop mainly sold electric heaters to freezing residents of Transnistria, the self-proclaimed microstate in eastern Moldova.Cheaper models are already sold out, a shop assistant said, but high-end heaters are selling fast, while 350,000 Transnistrians face an energy crisis that has closed factories, left Soviet-era apartment blocks without heat and hot water and raised questions about the survival of their independent Russian-speaking enclave.The situation is so serious that the region's president, Vadim Krasno...

The two sides involved in a high-profile Supreme Court fight over a measure that could shut down TikTok submitted their closing written arguments Friday, sharply contesting China's influence on the site and the role the First Amendment should play in evaluating the law .Their briefs, filed under an exceptionally shortened schedule set last month by the justices, were part of a high-stakes fight over the government's insistence that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, sell the app's U.S. operations or the would close. The Supreme Court, seeking to resolve the case before the statutory deadline of January 19, will consider the arguments in a special session next Friday.The court's ruling, which could come this month, will decide the fate of a powerful and pervasive cultural phenomenon that u...

Hamas' military wing on Saturday released a video of Liri Albag, one of around 250 people taken hostage by the group during the attack on Israel, as Israeli and Hamas officials held further indirect ceasefire talks through mediators in Qatar .Around 100 hostages are still held in Gaza nearly 15 months after Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023 sparked Israel's war on Gaza. Talks to free them stalled after a week-long truce in November 2023 that allowed the release of 105 Israeli and foreign prisoners.Ms. Albag, 19, served in a lookout unit tasked with monitoring possible threats along the Gaza border. During the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Palestinian fighters overran the military base where she served, killing more than 60 soldiers and kidnapping Ms. Albag and six other female so...

Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label like cigarette packs do, the U.S. surgeon general said Friday.It's the latest salvo in a heated debate over the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades it was said that drinking moderately helped prevent heart attacks and strokes. This perception has been incorporated into the dietary advice given to Americans. But growing research has linked alcohol consumption, sometimes even within recommended limits, to various types of cancer. Labels currently on bottles and cans of alcoholic beverages warn of drinking during pregnancy or before driving or operating other machinery, and of "health risks" in g...

The Catholic priest stood at the altar of the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dipping dozens of heads into water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.Then he rejoiced in Christianity's recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim – as had been the men, women and children who stood before him.The ceremony was one of many held in recent months in Kosovo, a former Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93% of the population said they were Muslim and only 1.75% Roman Catholic. .A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic relatives to see the Church as an expression of their identity. They call i...

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Beijing-based cybersecurity firm on Friday, accusing it of helping Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. communications systems and conduct surveillance on four continents.In an announcement, the department said the company, Integrity Technology Group, had supported a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon in a campaign to break into foreign networks between the summer of 2022 and 2023, saying it having discovered that the group had "information sent to and received regularly by Integrity Tech infrastructure".The action came after the Treasury Department revealed in a letter to lawmakers this week that a Chinese intelligence agency had breached its systems in what appeared to be a spy operation, gaining access to government empl...

Syria's new leaders met with French and German foreign ministers in the capital Damascus on Friday, in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month.German Annalena Baerbock and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus on the first such trip in years on behalf of the European Union, as world powers began building ties with Hayat Tahrir al- Sham, the Islamic group that leads the new Syrian government.Ms Baerbock and Mr Barrot met Ahmad al-Shara, the group's leader, after visiting the infamous Sednaya prison, where the al-Assad regime had tortured and killed thousands of inmates.“We travel to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Ms. Baerbock said in a statemen...