Judges will rule on Thursday in the insurrection trial of former President Yoon Suk Yeol. He could get the death penalty for his short-lived imposition of martial law in 2024.
Narendra Modi, the prime minister, convened foreign leaders, the richest Silicon Valley companies and thousands of Indian entrepreneurs for a week of deal making.
The India A.I. Impact Summit unfolded across 120 acres in New Delhi this week, featuring more than 300 exhibitors and 500 sessions. Organizers expected about 250,000 participants and visitors.
Among elite athletes exists an even more exclusive club: people who compete at both the Summer and Winter Games. Many are sprinters who turn to bobsled.
A lieutenant colonel is on trial after being accused of skimming payments for battlefield injuries. He denies the specifics of Russia’s accusation but acknowledges engaging in a payouts scheme.
A search and rescuer who was hunting for survivors at the site of a deadly avalanche near Lake Tahoe has spoken out from the top of the mountain. John Gilchrist revealed on Wednesday night he was at Castle Peak at the huts where 15 skiers had been staying before they were hit by the huge...
The local declaration is asking the president to issue a Presidential Emergency Disaster Declaration. It seeks full reimbursement for the money the city and local utility DC Water are spending on repairs.
Billionaire Microsoft co-founder pulls out of India’s AI Impact Summit to ‘ensure the focus’ remains on event’s ‘key priorities’
Bill Gates has pulled out of a keynote address at the AI Impact Summit in India as he continues to face questions over his relationship with the deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder travelled to India, where his foundation works with the government on delivering AI for social good, earlier this week and was advertised as speaking at the international summit shortly after the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
The dog was taken in by the Retriever Rescue of Las Vegas after its owner made no attempts to reclaim her pup who has since been renamed "Jet Blue" and is available for abdoption.
While other countries are deep in a sex recession, the Danish drive shows no signs of stalling. How do they stay so frisky?
Copenhagen on the Thursday before Valentine’s Day is intoxicatingly romantic. That’s not hyperbole – you could breathe in and be drunk on it. The canals have frozen over, which only happens about once every 13 years, and couples are skating on them. You can see cosy bars from miles away because they’re strung with fairy lights – apparently not just a Christmas thing here. Everyone is beautiful.
But none of that comes close to explaining why young Danes in Denmark, unlike gen Z across the developed world, are still having sex. Winter isn’t even their frisky season. “You feel the atmosphere in the springtime,” says Ben, 35, half-British, half Danish. His friend Anna, also 35, originally Hungarian, says: “Post-hibernation fever, you can feel the sexual energy. Everyone is on. Everyone swims in the canals, a lot of the women will be topless – they’re like herrings.” (Which is to say: they are typically Danish, they love the water and they don’t wear clothes … I think.) Ben and Anna are millennials, of course, rather than gen Z: they provide the outsiders’ perspective.
People like me were targets of the Islamophobia that gripped the west after the US-led ‘war on terror’. Now I fear a chilling sequel is on the way
Twenty-five years ago, George W Bush persuaded European leaders to back his “war on terror”. That disastrous project cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East. It normalised racism and hatred for Muslims, refugees and racialised minorities in the US and Europe. I fear Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with its calls to defend white, western, Christian civilisation against supposedly contaminating racialised migrants – and the standing ovation he received from European elites – may mark a chilling sequel.
Rubio’s language of a shared and superior American and European civilisation differs from that of his bosses, Donald Trump and JD Vance. His tone is more emollient but his outreach is conspiratorial. Rubio talks of migration and identity and civilisational anxiety, rather than terrorism and hard security threats as Bush once did. In his Munich speech, Rubio flattered Europeans about the continent’s colonial past. He denied preaching a message of xenophobia or hate, and instead framed his call to defend national borders as entirely respectable, dutiful and a “fundamental act of sovereignty”.
Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company
Banned from education, a clandestine reading circle meets every week to pour over novels by Abbas Maroufi, Zoya Pirzad and Ernest Hemingway
Four young women sit together, waiting for the phone to ring. When the call finally comes, their friend’s voice is crackly and hard to make out, but they wait patiently for the signal to improve so they can start discussing their chosen book.
Every Thursday, the five friends come together away from the disapproving gaze of the Taliban for a reading circle. They read not for entertainment but, as they put it, to understand life and the world around them. They call their group “women with books and imagination”.
Programme that funds groups building tech to evade oppressive government controls under serious threat
For nearly two decades, the US quietly funded a global effort to keep the internet from splintering into fiefdoms run by authoritarian governments. Now that money is seriously threatened and a large part of it is already gone, putting into jeopardy internet freedoms around the world.
Managed by the US state department and the US Agency for Global Media, the programme – broadly called Internet Freedom – funds small groups all over the world, from Iran to China to the Philippines, who built grassroots technologies to evade internet controls imposed by governments. It has dispensed well over $500m (£370m) in the past decade, according to an analysis by the Guardian, including $94m in 2024.
Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences
What was I thinking? This is not as easy or straightforward a question as I would have thought. As soon as you try to record and categorise the contents of your consciousness – the sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions and occasional insights – you encounter far more questions than answers, and more than a few surprises. I’d always assumed that my stream of consciousness consisted mainly of an interior monologue, maybe sometimes a dialogue, but was surely composed of words; I’m a writer, after all. But it turns out that a lot of my so-called thoughts – a flattering term for these gossamer traces of mental activity – are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought, belated attempts to translate these elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable.
I discovered this because I’ve been going around with a beeper wired to an earpiece that sends a sudden sharp note into my left ear at random times of the day. This is my cue to recall and jot down whatever was going on in my head immediately before I registered the beep. The idea is to capture a snapshot of the contents of consciousness at a specific moment in time by dipping a ladle into the onrushing stream.
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