Author: Reporter

Emboldened by minimal battlefield gains and flagging Western support for Ukraine, a relaxed and confident Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said there would be no peace until Russia achieved its goals, which he said remain unchanged after nearly two years of fighting. It was Putin’s first formal news conference that Western media were allowed to attend since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. The highly choreographed session, which lasted over four hours and included questions from ordinary Russians about things like the price of eggs and leaky gymnasium roofs, was more about spectacle than scrutiny. But while...

How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable? This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino’s threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change. For Caroline Kyalo, a 28-year-old who works in a salon in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, it was a question of trying to figure out how to...

By the end of the century, the U.S. population will be declining without substantial immigration, older adults will outnumber children and White, non-Hispanic residents will account for less than 50% of the population, according to projections released in November by the U.S. Census Bureau. The population projections offer a glimpse of what the nation may look like at the turn of the next century, though a forecast decades into the future cannot predict the unexpected like a global pandemic. The projections can help the U.S. prepare for change, from anticipating the demands of health care for seniors to providing...

The human species has topped 8 billion, with longer lifespans offsetting fewer births, but world population growth continues a long-term trend of slowing down, the U.S. Census Bureau said in November. The bureau estimates the global population exceeded the threshold on September 26, a precise date the agency said to take with a grain of salt. The United Nations estimated the number was passed 10 months earlier, having declared November 22, 2022, the “Day of 8 Billion,” the Census Bureau pointed out in a statement. The discrepancy is due to countries counting people differently — or not at all....

Cars are getting an “F” in data privacy. Most major manufacturers admit they may be selling your personal information, a new study finds, with half also saying they would share it with the government or law enforcement without a court order. The proliferation of sensors in automobiles — from telematics to fully digitized control consoles — has made them prodigious data-collection hubs. But drivers are given little or no control over the personal data their vehicles collect, researchers for the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation said in September during their “Privacy Not Included” survey Security standards are also vague, a big...