Fastest News

The story of a deaf dance star. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2lFMNOe

Carmen's husband was killed six weeks before Mexico's election - now she's running for office herself. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2Mvrb2h

Dramatic footage shows a man calling police - from on top of a speeding car. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2lI2kNk

The two ex-England players had slightly different welcomes, with Rooney heading to a beer garden. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2yTkO72

A gunman opened fire on the Capital Gazette newspaper building, killing at least five people. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2KeMdFP

Germany's BND spy agency acknowledges it hired Nazi Heinrich Himmler's daughter during the 1960s. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2MBvGIX

Leesa A sings in the music video of her driving released on the day a decades-old ban was lifted. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2N9McAP

Is Sebastian Kurz getting too close to the far right as he pursues a hardline migrant policy? from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2tRYncH

Mexicans will be voting in general elections on Sunday against a backdrop of record levels of violence. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2lHky1B

A full-scale international effort is under way to reach 12 young Thais and their coach lost in a vast cave. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2ICDyrb

The kingdom of Swaziland, now known as eSwatini, is holding its first gay pride march - despite homosexuality being illegal. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2tMKvjK

The deal's convoluted language reflects continuing splits on the issue, writes Laurence Peter. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2Kh8kLD

Five employees were killed after a gunman opened fire at a local Maryland newspaper. Who are they? from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2Kt6F51

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mexican assets are poised to strengthen even if leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wins Sunday's presidential election, analysts say, on expectations he will govern from the center and as the uncertainty stemming from the race fades. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2tGIbeU

YANGON/COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Rohingya refugees returning to Myanmar will have no explicit guarantees of citizenship or freedom of movement throughout the country, under a secret agreement between the government and the United Nations seen by Reuters. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2tRmTui

BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) - A ceasefire has been agreed for southern Syria between the government and rebels, a Jordanian official source said on Friday, amid fears of a gathering humanitarian catastrophe in a region sensitive to neighbors Jordan and Israel. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2lGOFpL

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence agencies believe North Korea has increased production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months and may try to hide these while seeking concessions in nuclear talks with the United States, NBC News quoted U.S. officials as saying. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2lGFG89

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - More than 100 migrants are feared to have drowned off Libya's western coast after their overloaded boat capsized, coastguard officials said on Friday. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2MzDoTP

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's new government said on Saturday it is considering amending laws on human trafficking and migrant smuggling just days after the U.S. State Department reported a lack of progress in the country's efforts to counter trafficking in the past year. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2yYGoXY

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders on Friday claimed success in reaching a hard-fought agreement to control immigration but it faced instant criticism as vague, hard to implement and a potential threat to human rights. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2yVBWJt

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinians, one of them a 14-year-old boy, and wounded 415 others with live fire and tear gas during protests along the Gaza border on Friday, Gaza health officials said. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2Kgwru9

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he would raise the issue of alleged Russian meddling in U.S. elections during his planned meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki next month. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2KCAyAd

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump, less than two weeks before a NATO summit in Brussels, on Friday repeated his complaint that Germany and other European nations need to spend more on the military alliance. from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2MxezrA

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up 609 by xuki | 511 comments on Hacker News.

The Matrix Calculus You Need for Deep Learning 536 by prostoalex | 65 comments on Hacker News.

Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340M Records 412 by georgecmu | 287 comments on Hacker News.

Twitter Will Show Who Pays for Ads and How Much They Spend 401 by champagnepapi | 87 comments on Hacker News.

A firearms course for teachers in Colorado, Saudi Arabia lifts its ban on women drivers, immigration-policy protests in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, the World's Ugliest Dog Competition in California, a spider hunts along a Russian river, Fashion Week in Dakar, Banksy surfaces in Paris, a dramatic moonrise above a burning moorland in England, and much more. from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2lGQNxP

A mass-shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, at the Capital Gazette yesterday killed five journalists, making it the most deadly domestic attack on the press since 9/11 . Local police say a suspect in custody, Jarrod Ramos, appears to have acted alone and been motivated by retribution for a failed defamation lawsuit against the paper. As accounts of the shooting and its aftermath arrived, one detail stood out: The suspect was uncooperative after apprehension, and the county police used facial-recognition technology to identify him. Some would celebrate the use any available technology to name an unidentified and uncooperative suspect caught in the act of a mass shooting, especially before the incident is clearly contained. But recently, complex surveillance technologies, like a service that Amazon pitched to law enforcement, have come under scrutiny. In addition, the mass-market success of DNA-collection data have made that technology’s surveillance power potential clear. This spring, t...

Russia is in search of the ultimate deal with Syria. At present, Washington is pressing Moscow to halt Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military offensive into southwestern Syria; Moscow, meanwhile, wants Washington to abandon the areas in Syria’s northeast that it has liberated from the Islamic State. With a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin looming, Russia may try to lure the United States into a deal that would largely benefit Assad, Iran, and the violent extremists they inspire. Or, Moscow may calculate that it can have its way without a deal. The Assad regime is attacking an area designated a “de-escalation zone” under a 2017 understanding between Russia, Jordan, and the United States. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley recently implored the Assad regime to stop violating the ceasefire in Syria’s southwest, and said that the United States expects Russia to use its influence on Damascus to convince it to halt its destabilizing actions. “Ru...

It’s well known that the human gut is a thriving bacterial ecosystem—not to mention the skin, lungs, and various other parts of the body. But the breadth and depth of microbes’ participation in many systems on the planet are still not widely understood. For instance, there is evidence that there are microbes in the clouds, hitching thousand-mile rides through the atmosphere and helping to cause rain or snow along the way. Some of these cloud microbes seem to come from the soil, but others are likely rising up out of the ocean, a riotous soup of bacteria and viruses. In a new study in Nature Communications , researchers used a 13,000-liter tank of seawater to observe what microbial species are in the water and which manage to become airborne in sea spray, thus launching themselves into the atmosphere. The work was intended to help answer a long-standing question: Exactly how do microbes rising out of the ocean connect to the planet’s climate? Substances released from the ocean may he...

In one sense, the Trump administration’s actions against migrants fleeing violence and deprivation in Central America have made the United States a glaring global outlier. “The U.S. is the only country I know of that has experimented on any kind of serious scale with deliberately detaining children as a deterrent to their parents,” said David FitzGerald of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego. He was referring to the government’s now-reversed practice of separating kids from parents facing criminal prosecution for entering the United States illegally. (When it comes to those seeking asylum from persecution, as many Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans have been in the United States, countries typically keep families united and may not detain them so long as parents post a bond or can be monitored by the government while their cases are resolved. The United States has also experimented with solutions like this, though the Trump ...

A fatal single-engine plane crash in a corn field was the first story I ever covered for a local newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette. Life and death. That’s the bread and butter of local newspapers. The obituaries are among their most-read sections. What journalists don’t expect is to find their own colleagues in those pages, gunned down in the place where they work, the way five members of the staff of the Capital Gazette were, in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday. When events are horrific, as they were in Colorado when I was editor of the Rocky Mountain News, and 12 students and a teacher were killed at Columbine High School, I learned the difference between local and national journalists. Local reporters don’t get to leave the scene of the tragedy. It’s where they live. What they do matters to their community. And local journalists know it in their bones. It’s what makes their work worth doing. One of the reasons I loved working in local journalism was that I felt close to the stor...

Updated at 12:40 p.m. ET Since President Trump took office in January 2017, the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement and the non-binding Global Compact on Migration. The president himself has criticized refugees, blamed migration for Europe’s ills, instituted a travel ban that targets the citizens of five predominantly Muslim countries, and adopted a tough policy on migrants along the U.S. border with Mexico. The global community appears to have noticed. On Friday, it issued something of a response: Ken Isaacs, Trump’s candidate to lead the International Organization on Migration, was rejected by the UN agency, a rare repudiation of U.S. leadership by the Geneva-based body. Isaacs was a longtime executive at Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical Christian aid organization that is headed by Franklin Graham. He also served as director of foreign-disaster assistance during the George W. Bush administration, and worked in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. But his r...

To most people, Q93.51 would seem like an arbitrary collection of letters and numbers. But for Terry Jo Bichell, it represents an important victory, and the hope of something better for her son Lou. Lou, 19, is the youngest of five siblings, and the only one born with Angelman syndrome —a genetic condition characterized by a happy, excitable demeanor, but also by absent or minimal speech, delayed development, movement problems, and a high risk of seizures. It’s estimated that between 1 in 12,000 to 1 in 20,000 people have the condition, although exact figures are hard to come by since many are misdiagnosed with autism or cerebral palsy.   In the past, when Lou and other Angelman patients went to see their doctors, they would be listed under the medical code Q93.5. That code and others like it come from the International Classification of Diseases —a master list of health problems, as defined by the World Health Organization. These codes might seem like bureaucratic arcana, but th...

Over the course of the past three decades, the A has become the most common grade given out on American college campuses. In 2015, 42 percent of grades were top marks, compared to 31 percent in 1988. This trend of grade inflation—the gradual increase in average GPAs over the past few decades—is often considered a product of a consumer era in higher education, in which students are treated like customers to be pleased. But another, related force—a policy often buried deep in course catalogs called “grade forgiveness”—is helping raise grade-point averages. Different schools’ policies can work in slightly different ways, but in general, grade forgiveness allows students to retake a course in which they received a low grade, and the most recent grade or the highest grade is the only one that counts in calculating a student’s overall GPA. (Both grades still appear on the student’s transcript.) The use of this little-known practice has accelerated in recent years, as colleges continue to ...

By STEVEN LEE MYERS from NYT World https://ift.tt/2tOJjN5