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By Richard Orton and Wilhelm Furnon* of Photo: 123rf.com Analysis - A new Covid-19 variant is spreading rapidly and could soon become the dominant variant around the globe. The variant, called XEC, was first detected in Germany in August and appears to have a growth advantage over other circulating variants - but it is not a radically different variant. XEC is what's known as a "recombinant variant". Recombinants can occur naturally when a person is simultaneously infected with two different Covid variants. XEC is the product of a recombination (exchanged pieces of genetic material between two variants) between the KS.1.1 variant and the KP.3.3 variant. These two parent variants are closely related, having both evolved from JN.1, which was the dominant variant arou...

By Jared Richards, ABC News After immense, immediate backlash, Katy Perry explained that comeback single Woman's World was a feminist satire. But of what, exactly? Photo: Screenshot / Youtube "Tone-deaf." "Like its author had to have feminism explained to her by the top half of the first page of Google." "Made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it." "Stuck in 2016." These are just some of the reviews for Katy Perry's comeback single 'Woman's World', which led to a disastrous rollout of the pop star's sixth album, 143, out on Friday. Perhaps more damning than the reviews was the discourse within the Katy Kats (the pop star's devoted fan group) when a song snippet leaked pre-release. Some were sure it was an AI-generated fake, if not a complete troll ahead of a real comeba...

By Laila Bassam and Maayan Lubell, Reuters Thick smoke rises above the southern suburbs of Beirut after an Israel strike on September 20, 2024. The strike on Hezbollah's stronghold in Lebanon's capital Beirut reportedly killed at least eight people and wounded dozens of others, with a source close to the movement saying a top military leader was dead. Photo: AFP Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander and other senior figures in the Lebanese movement in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday, vowing to press on with a new military campaign until it is able to secure the area around the Lebanese border. The Israeli military and a security source in Lebanon said Ibrahim Aqil had been killed along with other senior members of an elite Hezbollah unit in the airstrike, sharply escalating the ye...

By Michael Sun of the ABC Demi Moore is the beating heart – and sinew, bone and tendon – of The Substance. Photo: Madman Would you take a miracle drug that guaranteed eternal youth? That granted poreless skin and supple limbs? That reversed all the violence of the world and restored the body to its smoothest, its tautest, its lithest? What if it wasn't so eternal after all? What if it came with a raft of unknown - and grotesque - side effects? What if the flesh rotted and bruised, peeled off like mandarin skin? Would you keep taking it? Would you? This is the Faustian bargain that powers The Substance - French director Coralie Fargeat's fantastically nasty, proudly gaudy piece of body horror that instantly cleaved audiences into loud, warring factions at its Cannes premiere earlier t...