Continued Russian attacks across Ukraine this week made for a tragic start to the new school year, a senior official with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a statement on Friday. 

As African countries grapple with a deadly mpox outbreak, the UN independent expert on the right to health on Friday stressed that equitable access to vaccines is crucial in the race to save lives.

Recent “catastrophic and massive floods” in Bangladesh have affected millions of people across the country, including those in Cox’s Bazar where nearly one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live alongside host communities, spokesperson William Spindler told journalists in Geneva on Friday. 

Governments, experts and civil society representatives met in Brazil this week for a UN-backed conference to examine solutions that address the interlinked challenges of the climate emergency and the sustainable development crisis. 

Iceland´s glaciers are retreating so rapidly that future generations may wonder how the ancient island nation got its name. No surprise then that the land of the Vikings was chosen to house the world’s first global glacier graveyard which was unveiled at a ceremony last month, close to the capital Reykjavik.

Make sure you know about everything Google's streaming platform can do.

After eight years of development, Sony pulled the plug on Concord today after just two weeks. Fans loved it, but seemingly not enough. Is the future of the industry blockbuster-or-bust?

A 125-year-old theory explains why humans want luxury items even more when the prices go up. Blame social media—and ubiquitous counterfeits—for making it even worse.

Is Vice President Kamala Harris a “human rights hawk,” who would use American power to promote democracy and freedom abroad? Or is she a “pragmatic internationalist” who would back gingerly away from American hegemony?Is she poised to end an era of American hubris and restore humility to our foreign policy? Or does her forceful rhetoric on America’s role in the world reveal an “inner Reagan”? Two months out from the presidential election, there’s rampant speculation about what a “Harris doctrine” for foreign policy could look like, but it often seems to reveal more about what the person doing the speculating wants (or doesn’t want) in the next president than any particular worldview articulated by Harris.  It’s not that the vice president doesn’t have a track record to examine. While some coverage has portrayed her as something of a foreign-policy neophyte, she would come into office with more global experience than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump had.   As vice president, she has met with dozens of world leaders, represented the US at global gatherings, and attended the president’s daily intelligence briefings. In her Democratic National Convention address, she touted the fact that she had been the one to brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on US intelligence about the looming Russian invasion in Munich just days before it occurred in 2022.  The administration has also noted her role in the recent prisoner swap with Russia. She also was involved in US efforts to strengthen alliances in Southeast Asia, particularly with the Philippines. And though she was not the “border czar” she’s sometimes portrayed as in attack ads, she did lead the administration’s efforts to address the “root causes” of migration through aid to Central America.  What’s harder to pin down is how she might differ from the Biden administration, which is what all the “Harris doctrine” speculation is trying to pin down. When it comes to that, the analysis often comes down to — to use the buzzword of the moment — vibes.  In a recent Time feature on Harris’s record on Ukraine, Ukrainian officials acknowledged she had been engaged on the issue and showed sympathy for the country’s plight, but one official described it as feeling like “formal sympathy, following protocol.” In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, the host speculated that as the child of immigrants with a more global perspective, Harris “does not have that identification” with Israel that Americans of Joe Biden’s generation do. But that’s not quite how Harris has described her own upbringing. In a 2017 speech to the right-leaning American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) she reminisced that as a child in the Bay Area, she collected donations for the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. In 2019, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described her Senate record as “more AIPAC than J Street,” referring to the more left-leaning “pro peace” lobbying group. When it comes to how Harris might differ, even subtly, from Biden, perhaps no issue, foreign or domestic, has gotten more attention than the war in Gaza.  Halie Soifer, who worked as national security adviser to Harris in the Senate and is now the director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Vox that when it comes to policy on Israel and Gaza, there is little daylight between the two.  “I think the policy will not change,” she said. “What we have seen is some distinction when it comes to the way they speak about the conflict, with Vice President Harris not only reiterating her commitment to Israel and its security, but also expressing a larger degree of empathy with innocent Palestinian civilians.” This was reflected in pointed remarks Harris made calling for a ceasefire at a civil rights commemoration in Selma, Alabama, in March (remarks that were reportedly watered down by administration officials) as well as in her convention speech. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote, that speech did not differ particularly from Biden’s talking points but did, rhetorically at least, present “Palestinian aspirations for self-determination as the moral climax of her discussion of the issue.” Slate’s Fred Kaplan reports that sources close to Harris say she “privately disagrees with [Biden’s] formulation of world politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy … and sees that as oversimplifying and even misleading, given the kinds of allies that we’re sometimes forced to choose.”  The Biden administration has been criticized by some observers for paying attention to the “global south” mainly in the context of competition with Russia and China. Perhaps reflecting some desire to move beyond this framing, Harris remarked at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year that when visiting countries in Africa, she was constantly asked, “‘Are you here because of China?’ And my answer was, ‘No, we are here because of the people on the continent of Africa.’”  It’s also quite possible that Harris’s worldview and foreign policy rhetoric are simply evolving. The senator who, in 2020, said, “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need” is now the vice president who vows to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Ultimately, campaign rhetoric will only tell you so much about how a president will conduct foreign policy. Some analysts have noted that, as a senator, Harris was in favor of cutting support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and called for “fundamentally reevaluating” the US-Saudi relationship as a candidate in 2020. But then again, Biden promised on the campaign trail to make Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman a “pariah” before putting cooperation with the country at the center of his Middle East policy.  It’s not just that campaign talk is cheap, it’s that, as the noted international relations theorist Mike Tyson put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.  George W. Bush came into office promising a “humble” foreign policy that eschewed nation-building crusades. 9/11 changed that.  Obama first distinguished himself as an opponent of US militarism in the Middle East but will be remembered for expanding the US drone war, the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, and helping to overthrow the government of Libya.  Biden’s foreign policy legacy will be determined in large part by his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7 attacks.  “Foreign policy priorities, in every administration, are largely dictated by events,” Soifer said.  If there is a “Harris doctrine,” we’ll learn what it is only if we see her as president. 

Distraction Control, which removes annoying elements from web pages, is coming to the iPhone’s default browser with the release of iOS 18.

The second stage of the New Glenn rocket rolls to the launch pad on Tuesday. . Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. Vega rocket makes its final flight. The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program, Ars reports. About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space. The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.

Yes, it means we’re moving into Demure Autumn or even PSL Time, but it also indicates seasons themselves are getting warped by meme culture.

Video and audio of therapy sessions, transcripts, and other patient records were accidentally exposed in a publicly accessible database operated by the virtual medical company Confidant Health.

Google is rolling out a new ChromeOS update that makes it easier to keep your on-screen apps organized, copy text from images, and adjust camera and microphone settings on Chromebook devices. One of the more notable features introduced in ChromeOS 128 is Snap Groups — a feature similar to Windows 11’s Snap layouts that allows you to easily group apps together in a variety of fullscreen layouts. The feature is even triggered the same way as Microsoft does it, by hovering over the maximize app button. The ChromeOS camera app now supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from captured images of letters or other documents. It allows users to copy or search the text in images, more easily convert images into searchable...

AMD's Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build. It's been a while since our last system guide, and a few new products—most notably AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs—have been released since then. But there haven't been many notable graphics card launches, and new ones are still rumored to be a few months off as both Nvidia and AMD prioritize their money-printing AI accelerators. But that doesn't make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you're looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices. We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.

It comes with native support for all your apps so you don't need a Smart TV to pair it to.

Xgimi has announced an upgraded version of its ultrashort throw projector. The new Aura 2 is smaller and lighter than its predecessor while delivering more brightness, but the most welcome improvement is an automatic sliding cover on top that protects the projector’s lens and helps minimize dust buildup. Xgimi says the Aura 2 produces 2,300 ISO lumens of brightness from its “Dual Light 2.0” light source that uses a combination of lasers and LEDs. That’s up from 1,800 ISO lumens for the original Xgimi Aura, which should improve the Aura 2’s performance when used in rooms where ambient light can’t be completely...

This week on Politics Lab, we’re talking about AI’s potential impact on the election—and why it’s so hard to regulate nationwide.

After a public standoff with a judge over X and Starlink’s operations in the country, Elon Musk is showing signs of wavering.