Author: NY TIMES

John Pilger, a muckraking foreign correspondent and documentarian who trained his often righteous anger on injustices around the globe, like the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia and human rights abuses in East Timor, died on Dec. 30 in London. He was 84.His son, Sam, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pulmonary fibrosis.A tireless critic of Western imperialism and a voice for the voiceless, Mr. Pilger was comfortable with his role as a journalistic provocateur. He once derided impartiality as “a euphemism for the consensual view of established authority.”But he was sometimes criticized for shaping his reporting to…

David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not…

President Biden sent a letter to four senior members of Congress on Wednesday urging them to quickly approve a $20 billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, following the vote one day earlier by Turkey’s Parliament to allow Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to three U.S. officials.The White House sent the letter to the top Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which have oversight of arms transfers by the State Department to other nations. As of Wednesday night, the four senior lawmakers had not given…

Soldiers who seized power in three West African nations announced on Sunday that they would pull their countries out of their regional economic bloc.Military juntas in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso said they were withdrawing from the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, because of sanctions the group imposed in response to the coups that were carried out.In recent years, a string of coups have erupted across the Sahel, the arid strip south of the Sahara, forming an unbroken strip of military-run countries stretching coast to coast across the continent.While attempts by the regional bloc to reverse some…

I recently started losing weight, and am having trouble figuring out what to wear. It seems foolish to invest in clothes before I finally stabilize again, but wearing things that are too big not only doesn’t look good, but is not good psychologically. Any suggestions? — Paula, MilwaukeeChanges in your body, whether intentional or not, are intrinsically connected to changes in your emotions and sense of self, even before you start taking into account social messaging around weight and physical beauty.Altering your shape can alter your identity in pretty essential ways, and since identity is expressed in part through clothing,…

In September, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona created a first-of-its-kind job at the hospital system: chief artificial intelligence officer.Doctors at the Arizona site, which has facilities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, had experimented with A.I. for years. But after ChatGPT’s release in 2022 and an ensuing frenzy over the technology, the hospital decided it needed to work more with A.I. and find someone to coordinate the efforts.So executives appointed Dr. Bhavik Patel, a radiologist who specializes in A.I., to the new job. Dr. Patel has since piloted a new A.I. model that could help speed up the diagnosis of a rare…

In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco start-up working on artificial intelligence.Soon after, an Amazon executive sent a private message to an executive at another company. He said Anthropic had won the deal because it agreed to build its A.I. using specialized computer chips designed by Amazon.Amazon, he wrote, wanted to create a viable competitor to the chipmaker Nvidia, a key partner and kingmaker in the all-important field of artificial intelligence.The boom in generative A.I. over the last year exposed just how dependent big tech companies had become on Nvidia. They…

The estate of the comedian George Carlin sued the makers of a podcast on Thursday after they claimed to use artificial intelligence to impersonate Carlin for a comedy special.The lawsuit was filed against Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, hosts of the podcast “Dudesy,” saying that they infringed on the estate’s copyrights by training an A.I. algorithm on five decades of Carlin’s works for “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” which was posted on the podcast’s YouTube channel, where it remains. The lawsuit also says they illegally used Carlin’s name and likeness.The lawsuit calls for a judge to prevent “Dudesy” —…

Israeli forces pushed deeper into southern Gaza’s largest city on Wednesday, surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of people were seeking safety as a strike on a United Nations shelter killed at least nine people, according to U.N. officials and local health officials.The Israeli military said it had “currently ruled out” that its aerial or artillery fire had been responsible for the strike on the shelter in Khan Younis, where the U.N. was housing about 800 people. In addition to the nine dead, 75 other people were injured, according to Thomas White, who helps oversee U.N. aid operations in Gaza.…

His surname comes from the Russian word for hope — and for hundreds of thousands of antiwar Russians, that is, improbably enough, what he has become.Boris B. Nadezhdin is the only candidate running on an antiwar platform with a chance of getting on the ballot to oppose President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia’s presidential election in March. Russians who are against the war have rushed to sign his official petition inside and outside the country, hoping to supply enough signatures by a Jan. 31 deadline for him to succeed in joining the race.They have braved subzero temperatures in the Siberian…