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As home gardeners become more educated about the benefits of native plants (supporting native insects, birds and wildlife, and the environment as a whole), the focus has mainly been on trees, shrubs and perennials.Native annuals have somehow gotten lost in the shuffle, likely because most of them aren’t readily available at the garden center. And most of the annuals (and tender perennials treated as annuals) that ARE sold in local nurseries are introduced species from faraway places. As such, they don’t provide much benefit to the local ecosystem.Native insects have evolved along with native plants, so they recognize them as…

The United States announced Tuesday it will again pull out of the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency because it believes that its involvement is not in the country’s national interest, and that the agency promotes anti-Israel speech. This decision comes only two years after the United States rejoined UNESCO after leaving in 2018, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first administration. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the withdrawal was linked to UNESCO’s perceived agenda to “advance divisive social and cultural causes.” She added in a statement that UNESCO’s decision “to admit the ‘State of Palestine’ as a Member State…

A man walks past shelves of Coca-Cola bottles and cans at a shopping mall in Lagos, Nigeria November 5, 2019.Temilade Adelaja | ReutersCoca-Cola plans to introduce a version of its namesake cola made with cane sugar in the U.S. this fall, the company announced on Tuesday.Coke has used high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten its namesake soda in the U.S. since the 1980s, although it still uses cane sugar in other markets like Mexico. “Mexican Coke” has gained popularity in the U.S. over the last decade or so, as retailers like Costco and Target have stocked the drink, following the lead…

Hiring managers at hotels across the U.S. are ordering more background checks than usual amid a flurry of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids around the country, Reuters reported.According to the latest data from Hireology, a human resources and recruitment management company that tracks hiring and employment trends across hundreds of U.S. hotels, hotel hiring managers requested 36 percent more background checks from January to June 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. The spike coincides with President Donald Trump taking office earlier this year. In his second term, Trump has sought to deport millions of undocumented people from…

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI announced a partnership on Tuesday to supply its AI chip, RNGD, to enterprises using LG AI Research‘s recently unveiled EXAONE platform. RNGD is optimized for running large language models (LLMs) and just last week, the Korean tech giant LG unveiled its next-generation hybrid AI model EXAONE 4.0. The collaboration targets key sectors, including electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology, for a range of diverse applications. This news comes roughly three months after FuriosaAI declined Meta’s $800 million acquisition offer, opting to remain independent. The deal fell through due to disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and…

Nangarhar province, Afghanistan CNN  —  The wail of a woman in a floral dress reverberates through the malnutrition ward and down the stuffy hallways of a hospital in eastern Afghanistan: The unfiltered pain of a mother watching her 1-year-old son die. Families huddle on nearby beds, hugging their children a little tighter as they watch the mother crumple to her knees, clutching the motionless body of her baby. Mohammad Omar had been plagued with medical problems since birth. And it is impossible to tie any one death definitively to aid cuts. But food and medical shortages – exacerbated by drastic…

Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Emma Stone, Dwayne Johnson, Adam Sandler and Idris Elba are just some of the celebrities headlining films at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. Organizers on Tuesday unveiled the starry lineup for its 82nd edition, which kicks off a busy fall film festival season in August.Two years after launching “Poor Things” at Venice, Yorgos Lanthimos and Stone are returning with “Bugonia,” an English language remake of the South Korean sci-fi comedy “Save the Green Planet!” that is among the 21 films playing in the main competition. Clooney will also be back as star of Noah Baumbach’s…

About six months after coming out of stealth with $50 million in funding, Latent Labs has released a web-based AI model for programming biology. Latent Labs model has “achieved state-of-the-art on different metrics” when testing the proteins it developed in a physical lab, according to Latent Labs CEO and founder Simon Kohl, a scientist who previously co-led DeepMind’s AlphaFold’s protein design team. State-of-the-art, or SOTA, is a term often used in the AI field that represents the industry’s best performance to date on a specific task. “We have computational ways of assessing how good the designs are,” he told TechCrunch,…

CNN  —  A new photo of Prince George has been released by Kensington Palace to mark the young royal’s 12th birthday. In his final birthday before hitting his teens, George – who is second in line to the British throne – can be seen looking happy and relaxed in the new image published on the palace’s official social media channels Tuesday. George can seen posing by a wooden gate in a rural-looking setting, wearing a white checkered shirt and a brown fleece gilet, with a friendship bracelet around his left wrist. “Happy 12th birthday to Prince George!” reads the caption…

A 12-pack of Coca-Cola is displayed on a counter in a 7-Eleven convenient store in Austin, Texas, on July 17, 2025.Brandon Bell | Getty ImagesCoca-Cola is expected to report its second-quarter earnings before the bell on Tuesday.Here’s what Wall Street analysts surveyed by LSEG are expecting the company to report:Earnings per share: 83 cents expectedRevenue: $12.54 billion expectedLast quarter, Coke executives warned that the company would face tough comparisons in the second quarter to last year’s results, given the year-ago period was the company’s strongest in 2024. However, analysts are optimistic about the company — and its stock — because…