Sitting in the suite of an upmarket hotel with an iced latte in hand, Paul Banks (Essex, 48) shows few visible aftereffects of the intoxicated lifestyle that nearly sent him to the other side. The Interpol singer looks happy in middle age. His band, which shone in early-2000s New York amid the post-punk revival, is now enjoying a second youth, lifted up by a generation that once again reveres the archetype of the tormented indie figure à la Ian Curtis, with whom Banks has long been compared.

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Three years after the start of the war in Gaza, thousands of families still do not know what happened to their loved ones. Some vanished beneath buildings bombed by Israel; others remain unaccounted for. The destruction of territory, the displacement of millions of people and the lack of resources to recover and identify remains make it increasingly difficult to reconstruct their stories. The longer time goes by, the greater the risk of losing the evidence that could lead to them.

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Ricardo Almanza was 25 when he was arrested. On Thursday, when he walked out of the Preventive Detention Center in the San Mateo Xalpa neighborhood of southern Mexico City, he was 49.

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The scandal over alleged U.S. interference in security operations in the Mexican state of Chihuahua has taken another turn. It was not two but four CIA agents who took part in an April anti-drug operation in the community of El Pinal, in the municipality of Morelos, Chihuahua.

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Paulina Montesinos met a man named Baruc, an Italian in his thirties with an attractive profile, on the dating app Bumble. After they matched, their story moved quickly: they chatted for days, went out on a few dates and soon he started showing strong affection and lavish gestures. “I’ve met the perfect man,” she thought. He also presented himself as vulnerable, neurodivergent and with an intense past that aroused deep empathy in Montesinos.

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Citadel is one of the most visited shopping centers in Los Angeles. But in these lean times, few customers browse its clothing, bag and shoe stores. On this hot October afternoon, Rocío López is here, treating herself to “a luxury” amid the cuts her family has made to blunt the impact every time they fill the car’s tank or do the grocery shopping. The pressure on her finances became clearer with her latest tax return: she and her husband were shocked to find they owed $8,000 to the IRS.

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Humanity has never been closer to self-destruction. That is the warning of the Doomsday Clock, an initiative the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists updates each year to alert the public to threats facing the planet. It is now only 85 seconds to midnight—the symbol of total annihilation—because of the climate emergency, the rise of artificial intelligence and wars threatening millions of people. Moreover, amid a surge in militarism, the world’s most powerful countries have accelerated an arms race to expand and modernize their nuclear arsenals, which is why the Doomsday Clock was first unveiled in 1947.

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More than four million Latinos have turned 18 since the last midterm elections in 2022 and will be able to vote for the first time in the midterms on November 3. For years, Latino advocacy groups have pointed to the community’s growing political potential, noting that every 30 seconds, a Latino comes of age in the United States.

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In October 2023, as the initial shock of Hamas’s attack was giving way to the realization that it had been the greatest security failure in Israel’s seven decades of statehood, few believed that Benjamin Netanyahu would still be prime minister three years later. Fewer still thought that a country used to broad coalitions and early elections — having gone to the polls on average every 2.4 years between 1996 and the last election in 2022 — would complete a full parliamentary term this time. And fewer still imagined both things happening at once: that after four years of controversy and war, Netanyahu would enter the final stretch of the election campaign, with Israelis due to vote on Tuesday, less popular and less supported than before, yet still with a realistic chance of remaining in power. “I will not surrender,” reads one campaign poster bearing his image.

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Independent Senator Bernie Sanders and 12 Democratic members of Congress on Thursday asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain the alleged unequal treatment by his main platforms (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) of the campaigns of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who are facing off Sunday in the second round of Brazil’s presidential election. The final stretch of the campaign, tense amid polls predicting a technical tie, has been marked by alleged technical errors at Meta that have generally harmed the leftist leader.

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The magic of cinema is made in the most unexpected places. In an industrial park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, past small woods and residential neighborhoods, several gray warehouses hide eagles, castles, monsters and mice. You wouldn’t guess it, but there sits Laika which, alongside the British studio Aardman, is the most famous film studio specialized in stop motion animation.

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2026 has not been a good year for Meta. On Wednesday, a judge in New Mexico ordered the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to pay a fine of about $25 billion after finding it guilty of misleading Facebook users about its data privacy policies.

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The death of a person in France infected with the Shamonda virus (SHAV) has put European public health authorities on alert. “The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is carefully monitoring the situation after the French authorities announced the first ever reported human infection with Shamonda virus (SHAV), a disease that has until now only affected animals,” the agency said in a statement.

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They went into the first round of Brazil’s presidential election full of optimism. They were enormously confident that the veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would secure a first-round victory. In fact, even an outright win did not seem far-fetched to them. But election night on October 4 ended in colossal disappointment for 23-year-old Rhian Silva, for Julia de Oliveira Szöke, 25, both history students, and for the Brazilian left as a whole. Shocked, Silva allowed himself only a brief period of mourning before springing into action after Lula called for mass mobilization.

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Former vice president Kamala Harris landed in the state of Mississippi on Thursday at the start of a tour to help Democratic candidates in the final stretch of the midterm campaign. The series of campaign events, which began the previous day in Nevada and will continue in the coming days in Georgia, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, also serves as a thermometer for measuring the enthusiasm of potential voters for the notion of Harris running again for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028. That would be four years after her defeat by Donald Trump following a brief and disappointing 107-day surprise run for the White House.

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