A Globe-Spanning Collection of Children’s Art May Lose Its Home

NY Times - ven, 06/12/2026 - 05:00
For 40 years, a museum in Norway has showcased art by children from around the world, even toddlers. Now it has lost the state support it depended on.

An Algorithm Determines How Fast You Should Drive On California's I-15 Freeway

SlashDot - ven, 06/12/2026 - 03:00
Riverside County has launched an 8-mile "smart freeway" pilot on northbound I-15 near Temecula, using roadway sensors and an algorithm to coordinate ramp meters and suggest speeds rather than widening the freeway. Officials say the $33 million project could reduce stop-and-go traffic and travel times. According to SFGATE, similar systems in Australia and Denver reportedly cutting delays by 20% to 65%. From the report: Unlike typical on-ramp stoplights that run on a timer lasting a few seconds, Interstate 15 drivers could find themselves waiting up to four minutes or even longer while the system determines the necessary speed for traffic entering the freeway. By spacing out the cars, transportation officials hope to improve traffic flow, reduce stop-and-go traffic and decrease the amount of time that travelers have to spend on the freeway. The transportation commission spent $33 million to build the project, which will run for two years. Riverside County Transportation Commission spokesperson David Knudsen told SFGATE that if the program is successful, the agency will work with Caltrans to deploy it elsewhere in the county and then potentially to other traffic choke points in California. "This system is a lot less expensive than trying to build new lanes, and so the idea here is let's make the system that we have work better," he said. Knudsen said the program is not managed by artificial intelligence but instead uses advanced sensors in the roadway to monitor real-time traffic conditions and make adjustments. The stretch of freeway that connects Temecula at the Riverside/San Diego County line to the Interstate 215 interchange in Murrieta can be notoriously clogged. What can be less than a 10-minute drive with no traffic can take between 25 and 45 minutes during the afternoon peak period, according to the transportation commission. "The intent is to create a consistent flow of traffic on the freeway system, and the coordinated ramp metering among the three on-ramps ... will help do that," Knudsen said. "If we can manage that, then we can help prevent that stop-and-go traffic frustration that so many people feel ... on the freeway."

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‘Operation Pushkin’: Paris Trial Puts Spotlight on Rare-Book Heists

NY Times - ven, 06/12/2026 - 00:01
One by one, valuable works by Russian masters like Pushkin and Gogol were disappearing from libraries across Europe. Now six defendants are being prosecuted.

Oil Falls, Stocks Rise as Trump Signals Iran Peace Deal Takes Shape

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 23:48
Oil prices retreated and stocks rallied after President Trump called off plans for another day of strikes on Iran, saying that a peace deal could be within reach.

Supreme Court Blocks Alabama From Executing Inmate Using Nitrogen Gas

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 23:37
The unsigned decision for now spares Jeffery Lee, a convicted murderer, and could lead to a broader fight over the relatively new execution method.

Drones Flown Over North Korea Were Part of Martial Law Plot by Former South Korean President

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 23:33
A court ruled that Yoon Suk Yeol, the impeached former president, had sought to stir up instability to justify his bid for authoritarian rule in 2024.

China Lures Foreign Patients With Cutting-Edge, Cheap Medical Care

SlashDot - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 23:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While traditional hotspots in the region such as Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia focus on services such as cosmetic surgery, IVF or physicals, China is trying to differentiate itself by providing some of the world's most advanced procedures. "There are two reasons why a patient travels for medical treatments: availability of advanced treatments and price," said Victor Cao, operations director of Joyful Medical, an agency in Shanghai that connects international patients to advanced cancer therapies in China. "Chinese people used to travel overseas for treatments that were not available at home, but now tables have turned." As expanding visa-free policies eased travel in the past year or so, videos are proliferating on social media of foreigners recounting their positive experiences of treatment in China, usually for consumer procedures like acupuncture and tooth scaling. But one treatment that's more quietly gaining traction is CAR-T, among the most promising breakthroughs in oncology but unavailable in most countries, or extremely costly. The process sees doctors collect T cells from the patient's blood then modify them in a lab to produce a special receptor, CAR, that can bind to a specific protein on cancer cells. These engineered cells are then multiplied into large numbers and infused back into the patient. The CAR-T cells seek out cancer cells carrying the target antigen and kill them. In the US, one single infusion can cost between $300,000 to $475,000, according to the American Cancer Society. In China, the equivalent costs about $150,000 to $180,000, and it could get even cheaper -- its drug regulator recently accepted a marketing application for a therapy aimed to be priced below 300,000 yuan ($44,000). China's medical tourism market remains in its infancy. Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone in Hainan, which was designated as the country's only special medical zone in 2013, treated just a few thousand foreign medical tourists last year, compared to hundreds of thousands of domestic patients who visited. There, patients can access advanced drugs, devices, and therapies approved in other countries but not elsewhere in mainland China. But China is pushing to upgrade its economy and reshape its global image from just a manufacturing hub into a provider of high-value services, and demand for medical tourism is surging. Globally, the market is estimated at around $34 billion and expected to reach $126 billion by 2035, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research. Meanwhile, China's sector is projected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2025 to $3.4 billion by 2035, according to New York-based firm Market Research Future. "The patients chose China for something they can't get at home," said Shi Haoying, the group's founder and chief executive officer. "I think the growing attention to medical tourism to China is the inevitable result of long-term accumulation and development in many areas, such as growing medical technologies, quality of service and cost-effectiveness." Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, added: "Many new treatments, including in very advanced areas, are made in China but too advanced for the state of its healthcare system and the ability of its patients to pay for these things. It's in China's interest to integrate into the international system."

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Tornadoes Are Reported in Illinois as Storms Sweep the Midwest

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 23:03
For the second day in a row, Chicago is in the bull’s-eye of severe weather on Thursday, but the storm forecast is widespread.

Princess Bha of Thailand, Second in Line to the Throne, Dies at 47

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 22:36
Ever since she collapsed in a park three and a half years ago, speculation has swirled in Thailand about who could become the next monarch.

Trump Suspends Funding for Los Angeles Homeless Agency

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 22:05
The Trump administration cited misspending among the reasons for blocking funds to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Mayor Karen Bass warned that “people will lose their lives.”

Kennedy Center Appeals Order to Remove Trump’s Name

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 21:40
One day before a deadline to take the president’s name off its facade, the arts institution appealed a federal judge’s ruling that also temporarily blocked it from closing.

What to Know About Jay Clayton, Trump’s Pick for Intelligence Director

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 20:52
Mr. Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been overseeing an office known for prominent cases.

For a Knicks Reporter, Good Basketball Wasn’t Always So Easy to Find

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 20:00
In 2015, the team was so bad, The Times’s beat writer took a break to search for the game in its prettier forms.

Major League Baseball Will Question the Dodgers’s Doctor About Banned Drugs

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 19:30
The inquiry comes after a report that Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the physician for the team, supported the U.F.C. star Conor McGregor in using performance-enhancing drugs while recovering from an injury.

Study Links Smartphones With Declining Fertility Rates

SlashDot - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 19:00
Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

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Trump Picks Jay Clayton for Director of National Intelligence After Backlash Over Bill Pulte

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 18:52
The president said he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for the permanent role.

Mamdani Finds a Foil Familiar to New Yorkers: James Dolan

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 18:38
Mr. Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks, began a public feud with Mayor Zohran Mamdani with his team on the verge of an N.B.A. title.

Whipsawed Between Fear and Relief, Iranians Hope for War’s End

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 18:10
In addition to concerns about their safety in the event of another all-out war, many Iranians worry about the country’s economy further collapsing if the conflict remains in limbo.

Poland To Jail Online Streamers of Violent Crime For Up To 5 Years

SlashDot - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 18:00
Polish lawmakers have voted to criminalize "trash streaming," with up to five years in prison for online broadcasts of serious crimes such as rape or murder, animal cruelty, humiliating violence, gambling promotion, or even simulated depictions of those acts. Reuters reports: The move is part of a broader push by Poland to tighten regulation of online content. Recent measures include banning the use of mobile phones by children under 16 in schools and introducing stricter age verification rules to access pornography. Under the new provisions, broadcasting crimes punishable by more than five years in prison, including murder or rape, will itself be classed as a separate offence punishable by up to five years behind bars. The law also covers content showing cruelty to animals, violence aimed at humiliating others, and the promotion of gambling. The same penalties will apply to individuals who simulate or falsely portray the commission of such crimes while streaming, lawmakers said.

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SpaceX Finalizes IPO Price at $135 a Share in World’s Largest Public Offering

NY Times - jeu, 06/11/2026 - 17:38
Elon Musk’s rocket company said it would sell more than 555 million shares at $135 each in its blockbuster initial public offering, which is set to begin trading on Friday.

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