The US is witnessing a record number of job losses, and companies adopting AI might be one of the factors. In the first half of 2025 alone, companies announced 744,308 job cuts across the US, the highest since the first six months of 2020, when nearly 1.6 million jobs were lost due to Covid disruptions….
One person has died in an apparent shooting at an outdoor restaurant in the city of Wuhan in what would be a rare case of gun violence in China. A police statement said Monday that two other people were injured on Sunday night in what it called a case of “deliberate injury” resulting from a…
After three years of contentious negotiations, the member nations of the World Health Organization have agreed on a draft of a “pandemic treaty” designed to help the global community better prevent and respond to health crises. The agreement is aimed at averting the fractious, faltering response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which left many poor nations…
There was once a time when America’s lowest-performing students were improving just as much as the country’s top students. Despite their low scores, these students at the bottom made slow but steady gains on national tests for much of the 2000s. It was one sign that the U.S. education system was working, perhaps not spectacularly,…
Until 2020, few Americans needed to think about how viruses spread or how the human immune system works. The pandemic offered a painful crash course. Sometimes, it seemed that the science was evolving as quickly the virus itself. So The New York Times asked experts to revisit the nightmare. Of the most significant public health…
Over the course of 20 days in March 2020, 55 million American children stopped going to school as Covid-19 swept the United States. What was impossible to anticipate then was that millions of those students would not return to classrooms full-time until September 2021, a year and a half later. Those children and teenagers, often…
Those dark days began almost five years ago. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and four days later, U.S. states began to order shutdowns and travel restrictions. By the end of the month, the European Union had barred nonessential travel from outside the bloc, cruise ships were under a…
This is an AI-generated image, used for representational purposes only. (Picture credit: DALL-E) A new bat coronavirus with the potential for animal-to-human transmission has been discovered by a team of Chinese researchers, raising concerns about possible future spillover events. The virus, named HKU5-CoV-2, was found to use the same human receptor as SARS-CoV-2, the virus…
A newly discovered asteroid, 2024 YR4, has scientists on high alert as its potential impact with Earth in 2032 raises concerns. Currently 35 million miles away, initial calculations put its impact odds at 1 in 83, but that has now increased to 2.3%. Measuring 200 feet wide, if it collides with Earth, it could flatten…
GENEVA: An awkward question remains five years after Covid-19 began its deadly rampage: is the world ready to handle the next pandemic?The World Health Organization, which was at the heart of the pandemic response, has been galvanising efforts to determine where the next threat might come from and to ensure the planet is ready to…