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Irish writer Paul Lynch wins Booker Prize with dystopian novel 'Prophet Song'

Irish writer Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize for fiction on Sunday with what judges called a "soul-shattering" novel about a woman's struggle to protect her family as Ireland collapses into totalitarianism and war.

"Prophet Song," set in a dystopian fictional version of Dublin, was awarded the 50,000-pound ($63,000) literary prize at a ceremony in London. Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, who chaired the judging panel, said the book is "a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave" in which Lynch "pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness."

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Court document claims Meta knowingly designed platforms to hook kids

Facebook parent Meta Platforms deliberately engineered its social platforms to hook kids and knew — but never disclosed — it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint described in reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The complaint, originally made public in redacted form, was the opening salvo in a lawsuit filed in late October by the attorneys general of 33 states.

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Ukraine is shipping more grain through Black Sea despite threat from Russia

Grain thunders into rail cars and trucks zip around a storage facility in central Ukraine, a place that growing numbers of companies turned to as they struggled to export their food to people facing hunger around the world.

Now, more of the grain is getting unloaded from overcrammed silos and heading to ports on the Black Sea, set to traverse a fledgling shipping corridor launched after Russia pulled out of a U.N.-brokered agreement this summer that allowed food to flow safely from Ukraine during the war.

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Why Finland is blaming Russia for sudden migrants influx on eastern border

When Finland joined NATO earlier this year, Russia threatened retaliation.

Now, hundreds of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have appeared at Finland's border from Russia, seeking entry into the Nordic country.

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Girl, 11, confirmed as fourth victim of Alaska landslide, two people still missing

Authorities recovered the body of an 11-year-old girl Saturday evening from the debris of a landslide in southeast Alaska that tore down a wooded mountainside days earlier, smashing into homes in a remote fishing village.

The girl, Kara Heller, was the fourth person confirmed killed by last Monday night's landslide.

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How did humans get to the brink of crashing climate?

Amid record-high temperatures, deluges, droughts and wildfires, leaders are convening for another round of United Nations climate talks later this month that seek to curb a centuries-long trend of humans spewing ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

For hundreds of years, people have shaped the world around them for their benefit: They drained lakes, deforested lands and mined for metals and minerals to grow wealth and economies. They dug up billions of tons of coal, and then oil and gas, to fuel empires and economies. The allure of exploiting nature and burning fossil fuels as a path to prosperity hopped from nation to nation, each eager to secure their own cheap energy. Over hundreds of years, that impulse has remade the planet's climate, too — and brought its inhabitants to the brink of catastrophe.

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Russia intensely attacking Avdiivka, Robotyne, says Ukraine

Russia was intensely attacking the eastern town of Avdiivka and southern village of Robotyne, where fighting has centred in recent weeks, Ukraine said on Monday.

Neither side has made significant breakthroughs on the battlefield for weeks, as Moscow's invasion drags on for a 22nd month.

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Deadly storm cuts power to nearly 2 mn people in Russia, Ukraine

More than half a million people were left without power in Crimea, Russia and Ukraine after a storm in the Black Sea area flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines, Russian state news agency Tass and Ukraine's energy ministry said. Meanwhile, the Moscow region experienced its heaviest snowfall in 40 years, the governor said.

The storms and snowfall were part of a weather front that left one person dead and many places without electricity amid heavy snow and blizzards in Romania and Moldova on Sunday.

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Rescuers attempt manual digging to free 41 Indian workers trapped in tunnel

Authorities in India said on Monday they were set to begin manual digging of what they hoped was the final phase of rescuing the 41 construction workers trapped in a collapsed mountain tunnel in the country's north for over two weeks.

Rescuers have started to drill vertically — an alternate plan to digging horizontally from the front — with a newly replaced drilling machine excavating about 32 meters (105 feet), according to officials.

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Hezbollah to compensate Lebanese whose homes were damaged by Israel

A senior Hezbollah legislator said Monday that the Iran-backed group will compensate Lebanese whose homes along the Lebanon-Israel border were damaged by Israeli shelling and strikes.

Hezbollah militants and Israeli troops have clashed along the border since Oct. 8, stoking fears that the Hamas-Israel war in the Gaza Strip will spill over into the rest of the region. Though the clashes have been intense, with both combatants and civilians killed on both sides, they have remained largely contained to areas near the border. Hezbollah was not officially a party to the four-day truce between Hamas and Israel that took effect Friday, but calm has largely prevailed on the Lebanon-Israel border since then.

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