Year: 2024

A fire in the dormitory of a kindergarten and elementary school in central China killed 13 people, Chinese state-owned news media reported on Saturday.A 14th person was being treated for injuries in a hospital after the fire broke out on Friday night, China Central Television said. Firefighters were called at 11 p.m., and the blaze was extinguished by 11:38, according to the television report, which also said that the head of the school had been taken into custody. The CCTV report provided no further details, including whether any of the dead were children.A teacher from the school told an online…

For decades, Uganda’s campaign against H.I.V. was exemplary, slashing the country’s death rate by nearly 90 percent from 1990 to 2019. Now a sweeping law enacted last year, the Anti-Homosexuality Act, threatens to renew the epidemic as L.G.B.T.Q. citizens are denied, or are too afraid to seek out, necessary medical care.The law criminalizes consensual sex between same-sex adults. It also requires all citizens to report anyone suspected of such activity, a mandate that makes no exceptions for health care providers tending to patients.Under the law, merely having same-sex relationships while living with H.I.V. can incur a charge of “aggravated homosexuality,”…

It happened again. Of course it did.Two tennis players, starting near midnight, battling nearly to sunrise in front of a scattering of fans, with a squad of kids in their early teenage years scurrying after balls at nearly four in the morning. Last year it was Andy Murray duelling with Thanasi Kokkinakis until the night sky began to lighten at around 4am. On Thursday, and into Friday, it was Daniil Medvedev of Russia and Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland doing the tennis version of the 2am jazz set. “I would not have stayed,” Medvedev said in an on-court interview after he completed his…

Try going for a stroll in much of Guatemala City: It is a pedestrian’s nightmare.Motorcycles speed down crowded sidewalks. Rifle-grasping guards squint at each passerby, sizing up potential assailants. Smoke-belching buses barrel through stop signs.But tucked within the chaotic capital’s crazy-quilt sprawl, there is a dreamlike haven where none of that exists.In the City of Cayalá, a utopian domain created by one of Guatemala’s richest families, the streets are quiet and orderly, the stores are upscale and the homes attainable — if only to families from the country’s small, moneyed elite, or foreigners, like the American diplomats stationed at the…

King Charles III will have a procedure to address an enlarged prostate at a hospital next week. The 75-year-old British monarch’s diagnosis is common among men his age, and experts say that typical treatments are not dangerous.An enlarged prostate, known also as benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, is a noncancerous condition that occurs frequently among older men. By age 60, more than half of men have at least mild BPH symptoms, which include difficulty urinating and a sense of urgency to urinate. But often the symptoms are not severe enough to require treatment.The condition is analogous to menopause in women,…