Three British activists from the proscribed Palestine Action group are on hunger strike seeking bail and a fair trial, with friends and relatives warning they are close to death but determined to continue until their demands are met.Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed have refused food for 70 and 63 days respectively as part of a rolling...

Following the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro last week, the administration of US President Donald Trump has stated that it wants to quickly restore the country’s oil production and expand its mining sector.“You have steel, you have minerals, all the critical minerals, they have great mining history that’s gone ru...

The Trump administration has once again threatened to take control of Greenland either by acquiring it or through the use of military force to “deter our adversaries in the Arctic region.”Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, already hosts the Pituffik Space Base, which the US operates in coordination with Dan...

After the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the United States on January 3, nearby countries that host large Venezuelan communities, including Colombia and Peru, have warned of a potential new influx of refugees if the country is destabilised.The Venezuelan diaspora remains one of the largest in the world with at...

Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office one year ago as the 47th president of the United States after campaigning again on his Make America Great Again slogan and picking up from where he left off during his first term.During the past 365 days, the Trump administration has implemented significant economic, diplomatic and social po...

The US has announced the Gaza ceasefire is moving to phase two, where “demilitarisation, technocratic governance, and reconstruction” will be the focus.Hamas leaders and representatives of other Palestinian factions in Gaza are in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, for talks, but deep uncertainty remains regarding the next steps.Most of...

The internationally recognised government of Yemen, known as the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), says its forces have recaptured two strategic southern provinces, reversing a month-long takeover by the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC).In early December 2025, the STC, a UAE-backed secessionist force, seized the...

US President Donald Trump is in Davos, Switzerland, to attend the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum (WEF), where the issue of Greenland will be front and centre.Trump’s long-running fixation on acquiring Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO member Denmark, has escalated into a transatlantic imbroglio, with threats...

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, United States President Donald Trump said the US needs “ownership” of Greenland to defend itself from adversaries like China and Russia, but said he “won’t use force” to acquire the self-ruling island, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.Across the world, various natio...

Fifteen years have passed since the Arab Spring protests erupted in Egypt.Inspired by the successful uprising in Tunisia just 11 days earlier, when demonstrators succeeded in bringing down the country’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Egyptian people wanted freedom and their voices to be heard.For 18 days, millions took to...

Israel signed a record number of multibillion-dollar gas, technology and military deals in 2025.One of its most prominent deals came in December when Prime Minister Netanyahu approved the largest energy deal in Israel’s history. The contract will supply Egypt with up to $35bn worth of gas through 2040 from the Leviathan field, furt...

Over the weekend, the United States carried out a large-scale military strike against Venezuela and abducted President Nicolas Maduro in a major escalation that sent shockwaves across Latin America.On Monday morning, US President Donald Trump doubled down, threatening action against the governments of Colombia, Cuba and Mexico unle...

Millions of Christians, including those in Eastern Europe and across the Arab world, such as Palestine and Egypt, are celebrating Christmas today.Christmas Day commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, who was born in Bethlehem.However, for these communities, which number about 250 million people, the most important day of the season...

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia, put his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom by making semiconductors more powerful than any of his rivals’. This year, he’s promising to do it again.On Monday, Mr. Huang said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year t...

Tesla has lost its status as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles after Congress and President Trump eliminated the federal tax credits that had encouraged Americans to buy those cars.The company’s car sales declined 16 percent in the last three months of 2025, Tesla said on Friday. And its sales for the full year declin...

If the architects of the artificial intelligence boom are right, it is only a matter of time before data centers — the giant computing facilities that power A.I. — will float in orbit and be visible in the night sky like planets.The science-fiction-like dream is being driven by A.I. and space industry leaders who are growing increa...

Hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey NewtonProduced by Whitney Jones and Rachel CohnEdited by Jen PoyantEngineered by Alyssa MoxleyOriginal music by Dan PowellMarion Lozano and Rowan NiemistoHappy New Year! We’re kicking things off by sharing our tech resolutions for 2026 and reflecting on how we fared with our social media and meditati...

In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 ed...

In the past year, drone warfare in Ukraine has undergone a chilling transformation.Most drones require a human pilot. But some new Ukrainian drones, once locked on a target, can use A.I. to chase and strike it — with no further human involvement.This i...

Scroll back through the last year, and the same words come up again and again.The top-trending terms of 2025, from artificial intelligence to Zohran Mamdani, shaped headlines across politics, conflict, technology and climate.As the year comes to a close, AJ Labs has compiled an A to Z list of names, places and issues that generated...

The artificial intelligence boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, into even richer billionaires.It has also produced a crop of new billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups. These ind...

Israel has attacked more countries than any other country this year.In 2025, Israel attacked at least six countries, including Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen.It also carried out strikes in Tunisian, Maltese and Greek territorial waters on aid flotillas heading for Gaza.According to Armed Conflict Location and Eve...

For more than 20 years, Gmail, the world’s largest email account provider, has made it easy for users to change the username on their email accounts.But if a user wanted to keep all their data and services — like YouTube or Google Drive — connected to their @gmail account, the email address itself always had to stay the same.Some u...

How well do you remember the news from this year?In this quiz, you'll face 10 random questions based on 30 major news stories from around the world.Drop a pin where you think each story happened, and see how close you get.After placing each pin, you'll receive a score out of 10 based on your accuracy. If you need a hint, just check...

Nearly one-third of San Francisco went dark on Saturday in a power outage that began in the morning and knocked out electricity in more and more neighborhoods as the day wore on.At least 125,000 out of 414,000 customers were without power as of Saturday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.com and Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility...

Elon Musk has long had a vision for schools. Learning should be interactive and “as close to a video game as possible,” he once said. Schools should let children go at their own pace, he has added, tailoring “the education to match their aptitudes and abilities.”Since 2023, Mr. Musk has tried to build his dream of a better educatio...

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said in a hearing on Wednesday that the agency was not independent, stunning Democratic lawmakers concerned that President Trump could use the government office as a tool for censorship.The Republican chair, Brendan Carr, said in an agency oversight hearing by the Senate Commerc...

This summer, a group of executives pitched a business plan to Anthony Scaramucci, the Wall Street financier and short-lived adviser to President Trump.They wanted Mr. Scaramucci to join a publicly traded company with a peculiar strategy: accumulating enormous quantities of cryptocurrency to make its business more appealing to inves...

U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in on Tuesday.The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announ...

Three Democratic senators said on Tuesday that they are investigating whether and how the operations of technology companies are driving up residential electricity bills.In letters sent on Monday to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and three other companies, the lawmakers said the energy needs of data centers used for artificial int...

Ford Motor said Monday that it would scale back plans to produce electric vehicles and take a $19.5 billion hit to its profit to cover the costs of a major change in strategy.The announcement amounted to an admission by Ford that it had overestimated demand for battery-powered vehicles and underestimated the staying power of vehicl...

This fall, Microsoft announced a series of deals, totaling tens of billions, to lease computer power for its artificial intelligence ambitions. Meta secured almost $30 billion in financing to build a massive data center in Louisiana without taking on the debt itself. Google also committed to rent computing power from a small compan...

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is visiting Israel for the first time since taking office in May.His visit comes just days after Germany decided to lift a three-month suspension on arms exports to Israel that it said could be used in the Gaza Strip.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3The rise of global boycotts against I...

December 8 marks one year since the al-Assad dynasty, which lasted 54 years, was removed from power by a rebel offensive.The 14-year-long war led to one of the world’s largest migration crises, with some 6.8 million Syrians, about a third of the population, fleeing the country at the war’s peak in 2021, seeking refuge wherever they...

Heavy tropical storms and torrential monsoon rains have triggered massive floods and landslides in several parts of South and Southeast Asia.The downpours, which began late last month, have ravaged Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.As climate change exacerbates natural disasters across Asia, more than 1,800 people have be...

It has been one year since a lightning offensive by allied rebel groups led to the fall of Damascus, ending the al-Assad dynasty’s 54-year reign.Yet, as the regime collapsed, Israel seized on the instability by significantly escalating its military campaign in Syria, targeting much of its neighbour’s military infrastructure, includ...

Some users of the smart-bed system Eight Sleep, who sleep atop a snug, temperature-regulating mattress cover in search of “zero-gravity rest,” were rousted from their slumber earlier this week for a surprising reason.Eight Sleep’s collections of smart products, which the company calls “Pods,” and include those “intelligent” mattres...

After swiping aimlessly for years on dating apps like Hinge and Tinder, Emma Inge, a 25-year-old project manager in San Francisco, decided to try something different.In September, after following an ad to the website of a start-up called Known, Ms. Inge spent 20 minutes confiding in an artificial intelligence matchmaker. The matchm...

Elon Musk is daring European authorities to take him on.The billionaire lashed out at the European Union over the past week after regulators fined X, the social media platform he owns, roughly $140 million for violating digital transparency rules.In response, Mr. Musk called for the abolishment of the 27-nation bloc, compared it to...

The fall tech season typically brings a lot of hot new hardware, but what if you’re not getting a brand-new phone anytime soon?Your current device can probably still get an internal makeover, because Apple’s new iOS 26 software update runs on an iPhone 11 or later. And while only the newest phone models can run all the artificial-i...

Need to fill out a form, scan a receipt or sign a permission slip when you’re nowhere near your office equipment?If the task involves a PDF file, you can do it all with built-in tools on your phone or tablet without having to print things out on paper first. (PDF, short for Portable Document Format, was first developed by Adobe Sys...

Hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey NewtonProduced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney JonesEdited by Jen PoyantEngineered by Katie McMurranOriginal music by Dan PowellMarion Lozano and Rowan NiemistoThis week, Australia implemented the most aggressive social media ban in a democracy to date, kicking children under 16 off 10 of the most popular...

SpaceX, the rocket and satellite maker run by Elon Musk, told employees on Friday that it would buy insider shares in a deal that would value it at around $800 billion, and said that it was preparing for a potential initial public offering next year.In a letter to employees and other shareholders, Bret Johnsen, SpaceX’s chief finan...

A year ago, the price of Bitcoin hit a landmark of $100,000, sparking wild celebrations in the cryptocurrency world. With a pro-crypto president set to take office, industry boosters predicted that Bitcoin would surge as high as $250,000 by the end of 2025.Those rosy projections have not panned out.Over the last two months, Bitcoin...

The day before President Trump announced tariffs on trading partners across the globe in April, the German toymaker Tonies, which makes brightly colored audio boxes loved by legions of toddlers and their parents, celebrated the opening of a new factory in Vietnam. The timing was a coincidence; preparations for the plant had begun a...

Apple has removed from its App Store several programs that alert users to sightings of immigration agents after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded they be taken down. Most prominently, ICEBlock, a free app with hundreds of thousands of users, was no longer available as of Thursday evening to download on the App Store. ICEBlock all...

The Russians — officials, business people and media — turned out in force, but the only American in view at a gigantic, high-tech trade fair last week in central China was Elon Musk, or at least his disembodied voice, booming out from a Tesla video pitching “humanoid robots.” The Tesla booth was one of hundreds at the jamboree of d...

“In the 1950s, you could do the whole art world in an afternoon,” Irving Sandler, the renowned art historian and critic once told me about gallery hopping in New York. Not anymore. In the fifties, art galleries were clustered around 57th Street in Manhattan. Today, over 700 galleries sprawl across Chelsea, Tribeca, Chinatown, the U...

Is your e-book library a hot mess of random best sellers, audiobooks, ancient sample chapters and abandoned titles? Deleting old files helps, but if you also want better organization, consider sorting your content into “collections” or “shelves” (depending on your app’s terminology). These groupings work like albums for your photos...

This month, OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, graced the internet with a technology that most of us probably weren’t ready for. The company released an app called Sora, which lets users instantly generate realistic-looking videos with artificial intelligence by typing a simple description, such as “police bodycam fo...

When I received a phone call from an unknown number this week, I didn’t have to pick up the phone to find out it was a robocaller impersonating a utility company with an offer to reduce my bill. A robot spoke on my behalf and told me what the caller had said. I was testing a call-screening tool for iPhones that is included with App...

One month into the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, Israel has violated the agreement with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people. Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 282 times from October 10 to November 10, through the continuation of attacks by air, artillery and direct shootings, the Government...

Millions of Palestinians remain crammed into overcrowded tents, packed schools and other buildings, or sleeping on the streets of Gaza, as Israel continues its genocidal war on the enclave despite a fragile ceasefire. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, a lack of food and a shortage of medicine have turned Gaza’s makeshift shelters into...

Protests to end Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians are getting louder and larger. Seeing the livestreamed genocide Israel perpetrated in Gaza has had an effect globally, with the call to boycott Israel at an all-time high. Quiet boycotts, which started in supermarkets nearly two decades ago, have turned into widely used apps tha...

World leaders gathered in New York from September 23 to 29 for the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Israel faced growing isolation as speaker after speaker condemned its ongoing war on Gaza, and delegates from multiple countries staged walkouts when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage...

Every September, leaders from around the world gather at the United Nations in New York to debate and pass resolutions on the biggest issues facing the planet. The UN General Assembly (UNGA) opens every year on the second Tuesday in September. This year, it began on September 9, when the incoming president took office, the agenda w...

It has been two years since Israel launched its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s assault on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, in response to attacks on southern Israel by fighters from the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, during which 1,139 people died and about 240 were taken into...

The 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has begun its high-level week in New York, during which representatives from all 193 UN member states, as well as the two non-member observers – Palestine and the Holy See – are expected to deliver speeches during the annual general debate. Established in 1945 with a charter signed by...

France, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Andorra and Belgium have formally recognised a Palestinian state at the 80th session of the General Assembly (UNGA). They join Canada, Australia and Portugal, as well as the United Kingdom, which announced its recognition on Sunday, as Israel pushes ahead with settlement expansion in the occupied...

Last week the European Commission said it was preparing to introduce tariffs on Russian oil imports entering the EU through Hungary and Slovakia. It comes as US President Donald Trump has piled pressure on NATO members to stop buying Russian energy, in a bid to end the Russia-Ukraine war. At the UN last week he said, “They’re fundi...

The United States federal government shut down at 12:01am East Coast time (04:01 GMT) on Wednesday after Congress failed to pass a new spending bill, forcing operations considered inessential to close. President Donald Trump has threatened to use the budget deadlock to push through mass layoffs of federal employees. Democrats and R...

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be announced on Friday, October 10, at 11:00 am local time in Oslo, Norway (09:00 GMT). The announcement comes from the Norwegian Nobel Institute on behalf of the all-Norwegian, five-member Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and responsible for selecting and presenting...

Central bankers and financial delegates have gathered in Washington, DC this week for the annual International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings, which conclude on Saturday. Discussions this week have focused on global economic headwinds, as the IMF warns of signs of distress following US trade tariffs and protectionism....

In the early hours of Wednesday morning in Gaza, United States President Donald Trump announced that Hamas and Israel had agreed on the first phase of his ceasefire and captive-exchange plan. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump stated : “ALL the hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their troops to...

On Thursday, the United States military carried out its latest strike on an alleged Venezuela drug smuggling vessel, as the admiral overseeing the Trump administration’s controversial campaign in the Caribbean Sea announced his early departure. Officials did not offer additional details about the incident, in which they said there...

While much of the globe’s attention remains on the Gaza ceasefire deal, less than 33 kilometres (21 miles) away, Israeli settlers, often backed by soldiers, continue daily assaults and raids across the occupied West Bank. On Monday night, Israeli settlers uprooted 150 olive trees in the village of Bardala, in the northern Jordan Va...

Despite a ceasefire deal with Israel, Palestinians across the devastated Gaza Strip continue to go hungry as food supplies remain critically low and aid fails to reach those who need it most. As per the ceasefire agreement, Israel was supposed to allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza per day. However, Israel has since reduced...