Everyone's really quite scared of the uncertainty.

On the Indonesian island, school classrooms built from earthquake-proof, recycled plastic get kids back to school.

Critics say IMF provides loans to desperate African countries on stringent terms, disproportionately affecting the poor.

new york — TikTok and its bite-sized videos arrived in the United States as a global version of the Chinese app Douyin in 2018. Less than six years later, the social media platform is deeply woven into the fabric of American consumerism, having shortened the shelf life of trends and revamped how people engage with food and fashion.  The popularity of TikTok — coupled with its roots in Beijing — led the U.S. Congress — citing national security concerns, to pass a law that would ban the video-sharing app unless its Chinese parent company sells its stake. Both the company, ByteDance, and TikTok have sued on First Amendment grounds.  But while the platform faces uncertain times, its influence remains undisputed.  Interest in bright pink blush and brown lipstick soared last year, for example, after the cosmetics were featured in TikTok videos with looks labeled as "cold girl" and "latte" makeup. An abundance of clothing fads with quirky names, from "cottagecore" to "coastal grandma," similarly owe their pervasiveness to TikTok.    Plenty of TikTok-spawned crazes last only a week or two before losing steam. Yet even mini trends have challenged businesses to decipher which ones are worth stocking up for. A majority of the more than 170 million Americans who use TikTok belong to the under-30 age group coveted by retailers, according to the Pew Research Center. Whether fans of the platform or not, shoppers may have a #tiktokmademebuyit moment without knowing the origin story behind an eye-catching product.  Platform's algorithm is 'secret sauce' What made TikTok such a trendsetter compared to predecessor platforms? Researchers and marketing analysts have often described the platform's personalized recommendation algorithm as the "secret sauce" of TikTok's success. The company has disclosed little about the technology it employs to populate users' "For You" feeds.    Jake Bjorseth, founder of the advertising agency Trndsttrs, which specializes in Generation Z, thinks the app's use of an interest-based algorithm instead of personal contacts to connect like-minded people is what gave TikTok the edge.  TikTok also changed the standard for what was considered desirable in social media content. The beginner-friendly platform featured videos made without filters, lighting setups or production-level audio. TikTok creators could develop more intimate relationships with their followers because they appeared more authentic, Bjorseth said.  The platform has plenty of critics. Some experts argue that TikTok, like other social media sites, can be addictive and promote unnecessary spending. Others accuse TikTok of encouraging harmful behavior, like girls engaging in skin care rituals intended for older women.  Yet for all the detractors who won't mourn TikTok if it goes away, a vocal base of fans hopes it doesn't come to that.  Influencing fashion, accessories Casey Lewis, a trend analyst based in New York, said TikTok's clout in the fashion arena first became apparent to her when videos about Birkenstock's Boston clogs overtook her "For You" feed in 2022.    As the number of TikTok videos exploded, creators advised their followers where they could find the suddenly sold-out clogs. Lewis thought it was odd since her brother, whom she described as a "frat boy" and not a fashionista, wore the cork-soled comfort shoes in college.    "I'm not a psychologist, but I'm sure there's some psychology where your brain goes from thinking like, 'How weird? Is that fashion?' And then suddenly you're obsessed with it," she said.    The pace with which TikTok-shaped trends pop can be dizzying. In the last year, the hot pink ensembles of "Barbiecore" coexisted with the deliberately unsexy looks of "dadcore" — think chunky white sneakers, baggy jeans and polo shirts. The linen-draped "coastal grandma" aesthetic gave way to "eclectic grandpa."    While the rotating cast of "cores" may not drive their adherents to buy entire wardrobes, they're "influencing spending in small ways, and that adds up," Lewis said.    Influencers provide tips, tricks Daniella Lopez White, 21, a recent college graduate on a tight budget, said TikTok influencers provided tips on finding affordable clothes but also connected her to plus-size creators featuring fashions for larger-bodied women, which made her more confident.  "Those TikTok trends really helped me figure out what parts of my body I want to accentuate and feel cute in, and still incorporate my sense of style," she said.  A go-to spot With easy-to-follow cooking videos and clever hacks, TikTok became a go-to spot for home cooks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform made humble ingredients a star and earned endorsements from some of the stars of the food world.    "Every day, honestly, I am blown away by the creativity from the FoodTok community," restaurateur and chef Gordon Ramsay said in a TikTok video late last year.    Like the clothing styles of earlier eras, foods that had fallen out of fashion were resurrected via TikTok. U.S. sales of cottage cheese jumped 34% between April 2022 and April 2024 after videos promoting cottage cheese ice cream, cottage cheese toast and other recipes racked up millions of views.  Ben Sokolsky, the general manager of sales and marketing for Dallas-based dairy company Daisy Brand, said cottage cheese is seeing its highest sustained growth in nearly 50 years. The curdled milk product used to be a "secret sensation," but social media helped expose new customers to its benefits, Sokolsky said.  Topics that went viral on TikTok have even spawned analog equivalents. Last summer, TikToker Olivia Maher posted what she called her "girl dinner" of bread, cheese, pickles and grapes. It was a hit, with more than 1.6 million views. A handful of "girl dinner" cookbooks soon followed.    But the eagerness to try trendy foods had a downside. A 14-year-old in Massachusetts died after trying a challenge involving an extremely spicy tortilla chip that appeared on TikTok and other social media sites. An autopsy of the boy, who had a congenital heart defect, found that eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract caused his death. Paqui, the maker of the chip, pulled it off the market.  Upending cosmetic industry TikTok has upended the cosmetics industry by causing ingredients to get labeled as the next miracle cure or to be avoided and featuring videos of people gleefully applying or panning the contents of their latest shopping hauls.  Influencers on TikTok and elsewhere have made freckles an asset with clips showing how to add faux ones with eyebrow pencils or broccoli florets. The "clean girl" aesthetic, a renamed version of the no-makeup makeup look, prompted both luxury and drugstore brands to rush out their own versions of skin tints and lip oils.  Some veteran users of TikTok have noted the platform is almost too good in its role as both a tastemaker and a shopping search engine. A popular category of beauty videos shows influencers "decluttering" drawers filled with piles of barely used lipsticks, blushes and eyeshadow palettes.  Though the desire for clicks can encourage creators to follow the same hair and makeup trends, TikTok's defenders credit the platform with forcing brands to create products for a wider range of skin tones and hair types.  Tiffany Watson, who currently has more than 31,00 followers on TikTok and has done paid partnerships with brands like Colourpop Cosmetics, said the platform has promoted a more inclusive image of beauty compared to other sites.  "I see more diversity on TikTok because (with) every video you're swiping, you're seeing somebody new," she said. 

Opinion polls have forecast the far-right National Rally will win the most votes but likely fall short of a majority.

paris — Photos of blood-red hands on a Holocaust memorial. Caskets at the Eiffel Tower. A fake French military recruitment drive calling for soldiers in Ukraine, and major French news sites improbably registered in an obscure Pacific territory, population 15,000. All are part of disinformation campaigns orchestrated out of Russia and targeting France, according to French officials and cybersecurity experts in Europe and the United States. France's legislative elections and the Paris Olympics sent them into overdrive. More than a dozen reports issued in the past year point to an intensifying effort from Russia to undermine France, particularly the upcoming Games, and President Emmanuel Macron, who is one of Ukraine's most vocal supporters in Europe. The Russian campaigns sowing anti-French disinformation began online in early summer 2023, but first became tangible in October, when more than 1,000 bots linked to Russia relayed photos of graffitied Stars of David in Paris and its suburbs. A French intelligence report said the Russian intelligence agency FSB ordered the tagging, as well as subsequent vandalism of a memorial to those who helped rescue Jews from the Holocaust. Photos from each event were amplified on social media by fake accounts linked to the Russian disinformation site RRN, according to cybersecurity experts. Russia denies any such campaigns. The French intelligence report says RRN is part of a larger operation orchestrated by Sergei Kiriyenko, a ranking Kremlin official. "You have to see this as an ecosystem," said a French military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal information about the Russian effort. "It's a hybrid strategy." The tags and the vandalism had no direct link to Russia's war in Ukraine, but they provoked a strong reaction from the French political class, with denunciations in the legislature and public debate. Antisemitic attacks are on the rise in France, and the war in Gaza has proven divisive. The Stars of David could be interpreted either as support for Israel or as opposition. The effect was to sow division and unease. French Jews in particular have found themselves unwittingly thrust into the political fray despite, at just 500,000 people, making up a small proportion of the French population. In March, just after Macron discussed the possibility of mobilizing the French military in Ukraine, a fake recruitment drive went up for the French army in Ukraine, spawning a series of posts in Russian- and French-language Telegram channels that got picked up in Russian and Belarusian media, according to a separate French government report seen by The Associated Press. On June 1, caskets appeared outside the Eiffel Tower, bearing the inscription "French soldiers in Ukraine." The larger disinformation efforts show little traction in France, but the Russian audience may have been the real target, officials said, by showing that Russia's war in Ukraine is, as Putin has said, really a war with the West. Among the broader goals, the French military official said, was a long-term and steady effort to sow social discord, erode faith in the media and democratic governments, undermine NATO, and sap Western support for Ukraine. Denigrating the Olympics, from which most Russian athletes are banned, is a bonus, according to French officials monitoring the increasingly strident posts warning of imminent unrest ahead of the Games. On June 9, the French far-right National Rally trounced Macron's party in elections for the European Parliament. The party has historically been close to Russia: One of its leading figures, Marine Le Pen, cultivated ties to Putin for many years and supported Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And its leading contender for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, has said he opposes sending long-range weapons to Kyiv. In more than 4,400 posts gathered since mid-November by antibot4navalny, a collective that analyzes Russian bot behavior, those targeting audiences in France and Germany predominated. The number of weekly posts ranged from 100 to 200 except for the week of May 5, when it dropped near zero, the data showed. That week, as it happens, was a holiday in Russia. Many of the posts redirect either to RRN or to sites that appear identical to major French media, but with the domain — and content — changed. At least two of the more recent mirrored sites are registered in Wallis and Futuna, a French Pacific territory 10 time zones from Paris. A click on the top of the fake page redirects back to the real news sites themselves to give the impression of authenticity. Other posts redirect to original sites controlled by the campaign itself, dubbed Doppelganger. The redirects shifted focus for the European elections and continued after Macron called the surprise legislative elections with just three weeks to spare. Three-quarters of posts from the week ahead of the June 30 first-round legislative vote that were directed toward a French audience focused on either criticizing Macron or boosting the National Rally, antibot4navalny found in data shared with The Associated Press. One post on a fake site purported to be from Le Point, a current affairs magazine, and the French news agency AFP, criticizing Macron. "Our leaders have no idea how ordinary French people live but are ready to destroy France in the name of aid for Ukraine," read the headline on June 25. Another site falsely claimed to be from Macron's party, offering to pay 100 euros for a vote for him — and linking back to the party's true website. And still another inadvertently left a generative artificial intelligence prompt calling for the rewrite of an article "taking a conservative stance against the liberal policies of the Macron administration," according to findings last week from Insikt Group, the threat research division of the cybersecurity consultancy Recorded Future. "They're scraping automatically, sending the text to the AI and asking the AI to introduce bias or slants into the article and rewrite it," said Clément Briens, an analyst for Recorded Future. Briens said metrics tools embedded within the site are likely intended to prove that the campaigns were money well-spent for "whoever is doing the payouts for these operations." The French government cybersecurity watchdog, Viginum, has published multiple reports since June 2023 singling out Russian efforts to sow divisions in France and elsewhere. That was around the time that pro-Kremlin Telegram feeds started promoting Olympics has Fallen — a full-length fake Netflix film featuring an AI-generated voice resembling Tom Cruise that criticized the International Olympic Committee, according to the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center. Microsoft said this campaign, which it dubbed Storm-1679, is fanning fears of violence at the Games and last fall disseminated digitally generated photos referring, among other things, to the attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The latest effort, which started just after the first round of the elections on June 30, merges fears of violence related to both the Olympics and the risk of protests after the decisive second round, antibot4navalny found. Viginum released a new report Tuesday detailing the risks ahead for the Games — not for violence but for disinformation. "Digital information manipulation campaigns have become a veritable instrument of destabilization of democracies," Viginum said. "This global event will give untold informational exposure to malevolent foreign actors." The word Russia appears nowhere. Baptiste Robert, a French cybersecurity expert who ran unsuccessfully as an unaffiliated centrist in the legislative elections, called on his government — and especially lawmakers — to prepare for the digital threats to come. "This is a global policy of Russia: They really want to push people into the extremes," he said before the first-round vote. "It's working perfectly right now."

As the war enters its 863rd day, these are the main developments.

Move is latest sign the countries are moving away from traditional regional and Western allies following spate of coups.

The world's top female player continued her grasscourt nightmare at Wimbledon, losing in three sets to Yulia Putintseva.

Massoud Pezeskhian has promised to bring changes at home and engage leaders abroad.

Dozens of Palestinians also injured in bombing in central Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp, Government Media Office says.

Storm is expected to again reach hurricane strength over Gulf of Mexico after killing at least 11 across the Caribbean.

The EU continues to export weapons to Israel and provide funding to various Israeli entities.

This is a breaking news story, more details to follow.

Many experts around the world say smartphones pose a danger to children's mental health, but does a ban work?

Journalist couple Amjad Jahjouh and Wafa Abu Dabaan and their children were killed in a strike on the Nuseirat camp.

Biden struggles to deal with a political and media pile-on over his age.

Centrist Masoud Pezeshkian defeated challenger and hardliner Saeed Jalili in a run-off.

With the far right seemingly headed for victory, voters on the left and in the centre feel on edge.

As the war enters its 862nd day, these are the main developments.