Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that Russia cannot defeat his people on the battlefield, so it is looking for other ways to break the Ukrainian spirit, deplorably by targeting its vital energy infrastructure as winter approaches.

In a world where peace is “never automatic”, leadership is essential on the part of the UN Security Council which must find better ways to unite in the face of gridlock, the UN chief said on Wednesday.

President Emmanuel Macron of France deplored on Wednesday what he saw as deepening divisions among the world’s nations, telling the General Assembly that effective multilateralism has never been more necessary to rebuild trust and tackle crises.

As wars and crises dominate global headlines, leaders from small island developing States used the UN General Assembly platform to sound the alarm on climate change – their most pressing existential threat – warning that it is obliterating economies and livelihoods.

Amid ongoing wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan – and the escalating risk of wider conflict in the Middle East – world leaders and senior UN officials at the General Assembly’s annual debate warned that deep geopolitical divisions are hindering progress on critical global challenges – from securing peace to climate change and UN reform. Many stressed however, that a better future for all lay in decisive and united multilateral action and commitment to the ideals of the UN Charter.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an invisible killer, which is directly responsible for 1.3 million deaths and a contributing factor to five million other fatalities every year. Everyone seems to have had a family member or friend who has either gotten seriously ill or died due to acquiring an infection that did not respond to prescribed medicines, and the underlying reason was often antimicrobial resistance. Yet, there are many ways of addressing this threat, from hygiene and sanitation to vaccination and avoiding overuse or misuse of medicines.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged the Security Council on Wednesday “to work in lock-step” to end the escalating violence between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants across the Blue Line in southern Lebanon.

As foreign ministers from the G20 group of industrialised nations met on Wednesday to discuss sustainability and justice issues, the UN chief urged global financial institutions to “cooperate and collaborate for the good of humanity.” 

With global sea level rising faster than at any time over the last 3,000 years, UN Member States met on Wednesday to examine how best to address this existential threat. 

One billion people experience migraines, yet the perfect treatment is still out of reach. Can a vibrator offer a surprising solution?

There is a word that is the bane of existence for English teachers, parents, and podcast listeners everywhere: “like.” This week on Explain It to Me, we answer a pressing question for our listener, Allison: “Why do I use the word ‘like’ so much?” Allison is a college junior, and with graduation on the horizon, she wants to sound more mature before she enters the workforce. “When I’ve been in internship interviews or job interviews, I do my best to speak more eloquently,” she said. “Why do I say “like’ so often?” To tackle this question, I had a conversation with Valerie Fridland, sociolinguist and author of the book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Though often dismissed as a “filler word,” Friedland argues that we use “like” in our conversations for a reason. “The reality with ‘like’ is it has come into our language because it serves some really important purposes for us,” she said. “No one starts using a word because it’s pointless.” Fridland talked to me about how “like” is indispensable in so many ways, how it entered the lexicon, and if people use it as often as we think.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. For more, you can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545. I remember being as young as seventh grade and my parents being at a parent teacher conference. My mom and dad said to my teacher, “She uses the word ‘like’ so much. How do we get her to stop?” And my teacher was like, “Oh, my kids do it too.”  I want to say that when you were introducing that, you’re saying what the teacher was saying. You said “she was like.” I can’t turn it off! But it was serving a function for you because that is one form of “like.” It’s what we call in linguistic speak a “quotative like,” and that “like” substitutes for the verb “to say.” What you are doing is saying, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It’s a really useful tool because it allows you more flexibility when telling a story. That makes sense. You can use it sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. And a lot of times you use “like” to indicate that this is a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor. Then, you can also use it at the beginning of a sentence. And that’s a little different. That’s usually a sentential adverbial, which makes it sound fancy and important, but really what it means is it’s a linking “like.” So when you say something such as “I don’t know what he did. Like, I think he was a doctor.”  The similarity among all these likes is that they’re all expressing some sort of subjectivity. And that’s the true power of “like.” Subjectivity is something that’s often frowned on and not taken as seriously as something that’s considered a cold, hard fact. Absolutely. There are a number of reasons why people don’t like “like.” I think one is because its whole purpose is impreciseness.  Often we take impreciseness to be uncertainty, but those are not the same thing. Just because someone is imprecise in what they’re saying doesn’t mean they’re uncertain about what they’re saying. Those are actually two very important distinctions. Unfortunately, the people that tend to be associated with “like” use, are also the people that are typically thought of as vacuous, empty-headed and sort of clueless. And that’s young people and women. Those are also the people that tend to use “like” the most. So you throw in this feature that marks impreciseness on a group that is often associated with being uncertain, being less sure of themselves, being less confident — which is not a fair assessment of them — but still the assessment. That makes for a feature people don’t like. What is it about the word like that makes it so flexible for all these different uses? Like is a very, very, very old word. Words shift and change meaning through time. And the older the word, the more often it can do this.  In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode the bike like the sky was on fire.” Then, in the 1700s, you start to see it as a discourse marker, often from lower status criminal witnesses or criminal defendants giving testimony in the Old Bailey proceedings in London.  That’s where we actually start to see “like” used this way for the first time. Who uses “like” the most now? When we look at studies done in the early 2000s, users under 40 were the most predominant “like” users, and users over 40 used it to a much less degree. It seems to have really come into fashion in the 80s and 90s.  It has increased in use in every generation since. So is it true that it is very much a Gen Z feature? Yes. And they might use it more than the generation above them, because it has continued to progress in their speech. But were they the innovators? Absolutely not. And was it something that was really a strong feature of the previous generations, millennials and Gen X? Absolutely. 

Duolingo, best known for its language-learning app, has teamed up with the instrument brand Loog to offer a beginner-friendly portable piano. The $249 Loog x Duolingo Piano is meant to complement Duolingo’s similarly gamified music course launched last year. The keyboard is essentially a co-branded version of the portable digital piano that Loog launched on Kickstarter last year, featuring a near-identical wooden design, 37 keys, and a volume adjusting knob. Beyond the green color there are some additional aesthetic differences. The knob on Duolingo’s version is a lighter wooden finish, and it comes with a matching phone stand to follow the company’s music lessons as you play, for example. The most notable feature shared by both models...