World
The Take: How did China’s DeepSeek outsmart ChatGPT?
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PodcastPodcast, The Take
Chipmaker Nvidia lost nearly $600bn in market value as China’s AI model DeepSeek shook confidence in US tech dominance.
A new AI rival from China is shaking up Silicon Valley. DeepSeek matches ChatGPT’s power but was built faster and for a fraction of the cost. How did they do it, and what comes next?
In this episode:
- Caiwei Chen (@CaiweiC), reporter, MIT Technology Review
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Sarí el-Khalili, Sonia Bhagat and Amy Walters, with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Melanie Marich, Hagir Saleh, Hanah Shokeir and our guest host, Kevin Hirten. It was edited by Noor Wazwaz.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad Al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
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World
Actor Gene Hackman, prolific Oscar winner, found dead at home at 95 years old
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gene Hackman, the prolific Oscar-winning actor whose studied portraits ranged from reluctant heroes to conniving villains and made him one of the industry’s most respected and honored performers, has been found dead along with his wife at their home. He was 95.
Hackman was a frequent and versatile presence on screen from the 1960s into the 20th century. His dozens of films included the Academy Award favorites “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven,” a breakout performance in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a classic bit of farce in “Young Frankenstein” and featured parts in “Reds” and “No Way Out.” He seemed capable of any kind of role — whether an uptight buffoon in “Birdcage,” a college coach finding redemption in the sentimental favorite “Hoosiers” or a secretive surveillance expert in the Watergate-era release “The Conversation.”
Although self-effacing and unfashionable, Hackman held special status within Hollywood — heir to Spencer Tracy as an every man, actor’s actor, curmudgeon and reluctant celebrity. He embodied the ethos of doing his job, doing it very well, and letting others worry about his image. Beyond the obligatory appearances at awards ceremonies, he was rarely seen on the social circuit and made no secret of his disdain for the business side of show business.
“Actors tend to be shy people,” he told Film Comment in 1988. “There is perhaps a component of hostility in that shyness, and to reach a point where you don’t deal with others in a hostile or angry way, you choose this medium for yourself … Then you can express yourself and get this wonderful feedback.”
He was an early retiree — essentially done, by choice, with movies by his mid-70s — and a late bloomer. Hackman was 35 when cast for “Bonnie and Clyde” and past 40 when he won his first Oscar, as the rules-bending New York City detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 thriller about tracking down Manhattan drug smugglers, “The French Connection.”
Jackie Gleason, Steve McQueen and Peter Boyle were among the actors considered for Doyle. Hackman was a minor star at the time, seemingly without the flamboyant personality that the role demanded. The actor himself feared that he was miscast. A couple of weeks of nighttime patrols of Harlem in police cars helped reassure him.
One of the first scenes of “The French Connection” required Hackman to slap around a suspect. The actor realized he had failed to achieve the intensity that the scene required, and asked director William Friedkin for another chance. The scene was filmed at the end of the shooting, by which time Hackman had immersed himself in the loose-cannon character of Popeye Doyle. Friedkin would recall needing 37 takes to get the scene right.
“I had to arouse an anger in Gene that was lying dormant, I felt, within him — that he was sort of ashamed of and didn’t really want to revisit,” Friedkin told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012.
The most famous sequence was dangerously realistic: A car chase in which Det. Doyle speeds under elevated subway tracks, his brown Pontiac (driven by a stuntman) screeching into areas that the filmmakers had not received permits for. When Doyle crashes into a white Ford, it wasn’t a stuntman driving the other car, but a New York City resident who didn’t know a movie was being made.
Hackman also resisted the role which brought him his second Oscar. When Clint Eastwood first offered him Little Bill Daggett, the corrupt town boss in “Unforgiven,” Hackman turned it down. But he realized that Eastwood was planning to make a different kind of western, a critique, not a celebration of violence. The film won him the Academy Award as best supporting actor of 1992.
“To his credit, and my joy, he talked me into it,” Hackman said of Eastwood during an interview with the American Film Institute.
Eugene Allen Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Danville, Illinois, where his father worked as a pressman for the Commercial-News. His parents fought repeatedly, and his father often used his fists on Gene to take out his rage. The boy found refuge in movie houses, identifying with such screen rebels as Errol Flynn and James Cagney as his role models.
When Gene was 13, his father waved goodbye and drove off, never to return. The abandonment was a lasting injury to Gene. His mother had become an alcoholic and was constantly at odds with her mother, with whom the shattered family lived (Gene had a younger brother, actor Richard Hackman). At 16, he “suddenly got the itch to get out.” Lying about his age, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. In his early 30s, before his film career took off, his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette.
“Dysfunctional families have sired a lot of pretty good actors,” he observed ironically during a 2001 interview with The New York Times.
His brawling and resistance to authority led to his being demoted from corporal three times. His taste of show business came when he conquered his mic fright and became disc jockey and news announcer on his unit’s radio station.
With a high school degree he earned during his time as a Marine, Hackman enrolled in journalism at the University of Illinois. He dropped out after six months to study radio announcing in New York. After working at stations in Florida and his hometown of Danville, he returned to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. Hackman switched again to enter an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Back in New York, he found work as a doorman and truck driver among other jobs waiting for a break as an actor, sweating it out with such fellow hopefuls as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman. Summer work at a theater on Long Island led to roles off-Broadway. Hackman began attracting attention from Broadway producers, and he received good notices in such plays as “Any Wednesday,” with Sandy Dennis, and “Poor Richard,” with Alan Bates.
During a tryout in New Haven for another play, Hackman was seen by film director Robert Rossen, who hired him for a brief role in “Lilith,” which starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. He played small roles in other films, including “Hawaii,” and leads in television dramas of the early 1960s such as “The Defenders” and “Naked City.”
When Beatty began work on “Bonnie and Clyde,” which he produced and starred in, he remembered Hackman and cast him as bank robber Clyde Barrow’s outgoing brother. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called Hackman’s work “a beautifully controlled performance, the best in the film,” and he was nominated for an Academy Award as supporting actor.
Hackman nearly appeared in another immortal film of 1967, “The Graduate.” He was supposed to play the cuckolded husband of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), but director Mike Nichols decided he was too young and replaced him with Murray Hamilton. Two years later, he was considered for what became one of television’s most famous roles, patriarch Mike Brady of “The Brady Bunch.” Producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted Hackman to audition, but network executives thought he was too obscure. (The part went to Robert Reed).
Hackman’s first starring film role came in 1970 with “I Never Sang for My Father,” as a man struggling to deal with a failed relationship with his dying father, Melvyn Douglas. Because of Hackman’s distress over his own father, he resisted connecting to the role.
In his 2001 Times interview, he recalled: “Douglas told me, `Gene, you’ll never get what you want with the way you’re acting.’ And he didn’t mean acting; he meant I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my reservations as an excuse for not doing the job.” Even though he had the central part, Hackman was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor and Douglas as lead. The following year he won the Oscar as best actor for “The French Connection.”
Through the years, Hackman kept working, in pictures good and bad. For a time he seemed to be in a contest with Michael Caine for the world’s busiest Oscar winner. In 2001 alone, he appeared in “The Mexican,” “Heartbreakers,” “Heist,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Behind Enemy Lines.” But by 2004, he was openly talking about retirement, telling Larry King he had no projects lined up. His only credit in recent years was narrating a Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Unknown Flag Raiser of Iwo Jima.”
In 1956, Hackman married Fay Maltese, a bank teller he had met at a YMCA dance in New York. They had a son, Christopher, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Leslie, but divorced in the mid-1980s. In 1991 he married Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist.
When not on film locations, Hackman enjoyed painting, stunt flying, stock car racing and deep sea diving. In his latter years, he wrote novels and lived on his ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on a hilltop looking out on the Colorado Rockies, a view he preferred to his films that popped up on television.
“I’ll watch maybe five minutes of it,” he once told Time magazine, “and I’ll get this icky feeling, and I turn the channel.”
___
Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, compiled biographical material for this obituary.
World
Red Cross receives bodies of 4 slain hostages during Israel-Hamas exchange
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Hamas released four dead hostages to the Red Cross on Thursday, marking another step in the first phase of the cease-fire between the terrorist group and Israel.
The exchange, which took place in the Gaza Strip, was confirmed by an Israeli security official. Egyptian mediators assisted in the delivery of the caskets, which Israeli officials have begun to identify.
At the same time, Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in a move that was previously delayed. Red Cross convoys assisted with the transport of the detainees.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office previously confirmed the exchange on Wednesday, noting that it was likely to take place without the humiliating “ceremonies” that Hamas has engaged in prior.
ISRAEL’S UN AMBASSADOR SLAMS HAMAS’ ‘EVIL AND DEPRAVED’ DISPLAY OF HOSTAGES’ COFFINS
Red Cross vehicles, carrying the bodies of four Israeli hostages, leave pickup point after Hamas hands over the bodies without a ceremony in Gaza on February 27, 2025. (Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
On Saturday, Netanyahu temporarily delayed the seventh hostage-prisoner exchange in protest of Hamas’s release ceremonies, which were used to generate propaganda. In one ceremony, hostages were forced to pose with Hamas fighters and kiss militants on the head.
“In light of Hamas’s repeated violations, including the ceremonies that humiliate our hostages and the cynical exploitation of our hostages for propaganda purposes, it has been decided to delay the release of terrorists that was planned for yesterday until the release of the next hostages has been assured, and without the humiliating ceremonies,” Netanyahu’s statement said.
Hamas had called the delay a “serious violation,” though the militant group’s treatment of prisoners was condemned by international groups, including the United Nations.
FUNERAL HELD FOR SHIRI BIBAS AND HER SONS AFTER THEIR REMAINS HANDED OVER BY HAMAS
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Red Cross vehicles, carrying the bodies of four Israeli hostages, leave pickup point after Hamas hands over the bodies without a ceremony in Gaza on February 27, 2025. The bodies were expected to be handed over in the first phase of the hostage swap agreement. (Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Under international law, any handover of the remains of [the] deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families,” the United Nations Geneva said on X last week, attributing the quote to High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.
Israeli United Nations Ambassador Danny Danon told Fox News Digital that Hamas’ “ceremonies” were “evil and depraved.”
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Buses carrying Palestinian security prisoners are greeted by a crowd after being released from an Israeli prison following a ceasefire agreement with Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
“For 16 months, Israel has been fighting a deranged terrorist organization that places no value on human life, especially if it is Israeli or Jewish — all while international institutions like the U.N. refrained from condemning Hamas and formally demanding the immediate return of our hostages,” Danon said.
The Associated Press and Fox News’ Rachel Wolf and Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
World
Will the EU take on three new official languages?
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In an interview with Euronews, president of Catalonia Salvador Illa talked about the possibility of Catalan, Galician and Basque becoming official EU languages.
Might Catalan, Galician and Basque become EU official languages? That’s what the president of Catalonia Salvador Illa is advocating in an interview with Euronews featured on today’s Radio Schuman.
Illa visited Brussels last week, where he met with the President of the European Council, António Costa, and the Vice President of the European Commission, Teresa Ribera. A key priority on his agenda was advocating for the inclusion of Catalan, Basque, and Galician as official languages of the European Union.
The proposal requires unanimous approval from all 27 EU member states and is currently under discussion by European Affairs ministers. However, progress has been limited since Spain initially introduced the initiative during its rotating presidency in the summer of 2023.
Radio Schuman also takes you to India, where the European Commissioners are heading today for a high level meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as to European countries that have the most skilled workers.
Today’s Radio Schuman is hosted and produced by Aida Sanchez-Alonso, with journalist and production assistant Eleonora Vasques. Audio editing by Johan Breton. Music by Alexandre Jas.
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