Author: EasyReadHeadlines.com

Her confidence comes partly from her faith, Ms. Bueckers said on a video call in March, a couple weeks before the N.C.A.A. final. It was a rest day for the Huskies, and she had slept until 11 a.m. that morning. She had gone to a sauna and shot 100 free throws before the call; afterward, she had a massage appointment.Ms. Bueckers, who grew up outside Minneapolis, described her faith as a major part of her identity, which has also been shaped by her family. Her parents, Amy Dettbarn and Bob Bueckers, divorced when she was a toddler, and Ms. Bueckers…

The US Federal Trade Commission’s trial against Meta begins in Washington, DC on Monday, as the tech giant fights to avoid the spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC alleges that Meta illegally acquired the two startups in an effort to suppress competition.Meta (then Facebook) bought the photo-sharing startup Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. About two years later, the company snatched up the chat tool WhatsApp for roughly $22 billion.The FTC, one of the nation’s antitrust enforcement agencies, wants Judge James Boasberg to hold the tech giant liable for executing these mega deals to illegally maintain a social media…

President Trump defended his move on Friday to exempt some electronics from the escalating tariff war with China. He denied the announcement amounted to an “exception,” arguing instead the products were moved to a different tariff “bucket,” and suggested his administration could still impose separate tariffs for the semiconductor industry and broader electronics supply chain. “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday. “These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’” “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and…

During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety.The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise…

Just months ago, professional golf seemed to be on the brink of resolving a bitter conflict that had torn the sport apart. The PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, rival leagues that had been feuding over stars and audience share for several years, finally submitted a proposal for a deal to the Justice Department.Golf executives hoped President Trump would help move things along — and the president was confident he could.“I could probably get it done,” Trump said on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray in November. “I would say it would take me the…

Two Russian ballistic missiles slammed into a bustling city center in northeastern Ukraine on Sunday morning, officials said, killing at least 34 people in what appeared to be the deadliest attack against civilians this year.The midmorning strike on the city of Sumy was the latest in a string of intensifying Russian attacks on urban centers in Ukraine that have inflicted heavy civilian casualties despite the Trump administration’s push for a cease-fire.Officials said the city center was crowded with civilians out enjoying Palm Sunday, a Christian celebration popular in Ukraine, when the missiles hit. Lively streets were turned into scenes of…

SlitherStephen S. HallGrand Central Publishing, $30 Snakes don’t often get to be the protagonists. From the biblical tempter in the Garden of Eden to the eponymous snakes on a plane, your stereotypical serpent often gets cast as a villain — cunning, treacherous, cruel, deadly. But human views of snakes are full of contradictions. In mythology, snakes whispered secrets about the healing arts to the Greeks and established the concept of linear time in Mesoamerica. In the real world, they continue to inspire scientists in fields as diverse as pharmacology, reproductive biology and disaster relief. Sign up for our newsletter We…

Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.“Upstairs, Downstairs” captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before “Downton Abbey” was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’s eye.The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant…

Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast from the Superdome.Marsalis, now 64, knew the building well. An avid sports and music fan, he saw many Saints football and Jazz basketball games there, as well as concerts and other events. He also sold programs at Saints games. The joy of those days hit him when he walked into…

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The race to expand large language models (LLMs) beyond the million-token threshold has ignited a fierce debate in the AI community. Models like MiniMax-Text-01 boast 4-million-token capacity, and Gemini 1.5 Pro can process up to 2 million tokens simultaneously. They now promise game-changing applications and can analyze entire codebases, legal contracts or research papers in a single inference call. At the core of this discussion is context length — the amount of text an AI model can process and also remember…