Years ago, when people asked Geoffrey Hinton why he worked on artificial intelligence, he would repeat a line from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

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Each year, more than 1,000 southern right whales arrive from the cold waters near Antarctica to the gulfs of Península Valdés, in Argentina’s Chubut province, where they find favorable conditions for breeding and raising their calves. Between May and December, they become a defining feature of the Patagonian coastline, breaching or lifting their tails above the water close to shore. Although a small number of whales are found dead along the coast every year, the sharp increase in cases has alarmed scientists, who warn that this may become a record year for whale mortality.

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The eighth edition of the New York City International Book Fair (FILNYC) arrives in Manhattan stronger and more ambitious than ever. This year’s edition has double the number of activities, offering 160 events over five days, including panel discussions, workshops, professional sessions for the publishing industry, book clubs and, for the first time, programming for children and young adults, with dedicated spaces providing resources for teachers who want to promote reading in Spanish.

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Twenty million families living in poverty will begin receiving extra cash this week, just days before the runoff in Brazil’s closely contested presidential election. The 15% increase in payments from Bolsa Família (the Workers Party’s flagship anti-poverty program) that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced in September, shortly before the first round of voting, is reaching the pockets of the neediest just ahead of Sunday’s runoff vote.

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The upcoming U.S. midterms are not just another vote. They are on track to become a new testing ground for autonomous AI agents that first emerged in the Hugging Face attack. Experts are already warning of the potential for these “rogue agents,” seen in action this summer, to carry out more refined, dangerous and harder-to-trace disinformation campaigns and electoral interference than those observed in previous election cycles.

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It was Saturday night and Jean, a Haitian who arrived in the United States nearly 20 years ago, had left his job in Broward, north of Miami, hours earlier. But he never made it home. He wasn’t answering his phone and the location of his AirPods remained in the same place. Around 1 a.m., his doctor—also a family friend—went out to look for him and found the car unattended in a parking lot. At that point, Jean himself called and said he had been detained by immigration and was at a Border Patrol station in Dania Beach.

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The Donald Trump administration has done with Ukrainians and Sudanese this week what it did last month with Salvadorans: it has not terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS), but it has not renewed it either. The program that provides legal immigration status to 101,000 Ukrainians and 1,800 Sudanese citizens was set to expire on Monday, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declined to comment, which for now leaves them protected from deportation.

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Before running for U.S. representative, Bobby Pulido had already toured the communities in his Texas border district. He spent 31 years as a tejano and regional Mexican singer, performing solo and with his father, the legendary musician Roberto Pulido. In South Texas everyone knows the performer: they grew up with his hit Desvelado, they danced and fell in love to Se murió de amor. But for the past year Pulido has shown a new side—one some support without hesitation and others are still weighing as an option on the midterm ballot: that of politician.

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The American singer and writer Patti Smith, this year’s recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, said Tuesday at a news conference following the ceremony in Oviedo, Spain that “sometimes it feels like we don’t have power, but we do have power,” and that what the U.S. needs right now is “for people to use that power, to rise up, think for ourselves and then unite.” She added that for her it is difficult to talk about her country’s current situation, describing it as having “deplorable leadership.”

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The conversations of small groups break the night’s calm in Wudaoying, one of the most popular hutong (alleyways) in Beijing’s old quarter. At the door of a concert hall, Shao, 27, and Qin, 28, chat with beers in their hands. “They treat me like a little girl and on top of that I have to smile so as not to cause trouble,” Shao complains. She takes a drag from her cigarette and nods toward a co‑worker standing a few meters away. “I’m sick of so much mansplaining,” Qin replies, referring to the condescending explanations by men who assume women know less.

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A little over a month ago, at a high school on the outskirts of Paris, a group of students blocked their school to protest the condition of the facilities and the lack of teachers. Within days, students from other schools joined in, first in Paris and then across the country, complaining of leaks in classrooms and even cockroaches, and of walls that are cracking. They are cold in the winter and hot in the spring. That image of public schools — long considered a pillar of the French Republic, but gradually falling apart — also illustrates the economic decline of recent years.

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A tragic vehicle crash exposed a covert counter-narcotics operation riddled with irregularities. In mid-April, a pickup truck plunged off a mountain road in the Sierra of Chihuahua in Mexico, killing its four occupants. Two of them were officials from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s office, and the others, as was later confirmed, were undercover CIA agents. The case continues to unfold in new chapters, and over the weekend former Chihuahua prosecutor César Jáuregui was arrested, accused of treason for allowing — without authorization from the federal government — armed foreign officials to take part in sensitive security operations on Mexican soil.

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Morning erections are the gold standard for gauging testosterone, according to several male-oriented forums on Reddit, where an entire subcategory is devoted to the hormone, which is referred to online simply as T. In those groups—some aligned with the manosphere and others not—members swap and compare blood tests every six months. Being labeled in that universe as low T (low in testosterone) is a stigma that taps into several male anxieties: weak sexual drive, low energy, a certain timorous attitude toward life and a precarious bank balance.

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You may have come across various reels in your Instagram feed over the past few weeks featuring the film Promising Young Woman, a feature in which Carey Mulligan plays a woman who takes revenge on the allies of rape culture, fully aware that her vendetta will cut short her promising future. The reason Emerald Fennell’s movie has returned to the zeitgeist six years after its release is that it bears striking similarities to the Cornell case, in which a former student at that prestigious university reported she had been gang-raped and assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity.

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Eloquent and resolute, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, retains at 85 the passion and determination to continue the work that has defined her life: the defense of human rights.

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About 900,000 fresh flowers hung from walls, columns and ceilings; there were tins of caviar for each guest, Dom Pérignon, three wedding dresses and a 30-piece orchestra. The Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York hosted a wedding in September that was put together in under three months and cost around $10 million, according to the U.S. media. It was the week of the United Nations General Assembly, with Manhattan full of heads of state and diplomats, and the party drew major figures from U.S. power circles, oligarchs, Congolese politicians, the rapper Nelly on stage, and even former boxer Mike Tyson. But above all the celebration brought together the top ranks of Trumpism: the attorney general Todd Blanche; the FBI director Kash Patel; and White House counsel Will Scharf. It was a MAGA wedding for the glossy magazines.

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The warnings began circulating on Facebook groups in Laredo, Texas, two days before Mexican authorities confirmed them. Relatives of detainees at the GEO Rio Grande detention center spoke of sickness, neglect and a man who had allegedly died after more than a month without proper medical care.

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Dan Hanover has planted a sign in the front yard of his home in Tarrytown as if trying to ward off a curse. It bears just three words, “Mike Lawler for Congress,” but that is more than enough for everyone here to understand what it means: the retiree is determined to do whatever he can to help the Republican who represents this charming village north of New York City keep his seat in the House of Representatives after the November 3 election.

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Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with women. He was found liable for sexually abusing writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll. He was also convicted on 34 felony counts related to an effort to conceal accounting records showing payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence. The U.S. president has, moreover, a long history of making disparaging remarks about women. And with less than three weeks to go before the midterms, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that a majority of women voters back the Democrats, while only 32% support Republicans.

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