author - oman observer

Since the publication of the first “Chicken Soup for the Soul” book in 1993, more than 275 titles of the series have come out. Worldwide, more than 500 million copies have sold in over 100...

The call came from an editor in London last Monday morning. Could I get to the scene of a deadly train crash in southern Spain? I checked flights from Barcelona, where I live, grabbed my cameras and...

Declaring childbirth a patriotic act. Nagging newlyweds about family planning. Taxing condoms.To get its citizens to have babies, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled every lever.The efforts have...

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine and the United States are 90 per cent of the way toward an agreement to end the war with Russia. Within the 10 per cent still in dispute is who will...

Three days after Qiu Sijun, a retired bricklayer in eastern China, went for a routine diabetes checkup, he received a call from a doctor he hadn’t met before. The doctor, the head of the...

BLURB: No one knows the true toll of the massacre, and the city remains closed to the outside world, although some aid has started to reach other parts of DarfurThe capture of the city of el Fasher in...

In the hours after the massacre at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney last week, it seemed that Australia’s leaders had come together to offer a bipartisan response, as they had done...

About 13 years ago, Kyle Edmondson woke up after a night of drinking with friends and felt an intense pain on the top of his foot. Climbing out of bed, he could barely walk.His doctor told Edmondson,...

In the spring of 2021, the cancer field was abuzz over research that suggested a simple early-detection blood test could find dozens of different cancers, including many for which there is no routine...

Venezuela sits on more oil than Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States and every other country. Yet, it produces and sells only about 1% of the crude the world is using.President Donald Trump’s...

NEW DELHI — India’s government sent a notice to private companies last week giving them 90 days to ensure that a government app was “preinstalled on all mobile handsets manufactured or imported...

France announced the creation of a paid, voluntary military service for young adults, becoming the latest European country to beef up its armed forces in the face of perceived threats from Russia...

In the low-grade lens of the TV cameras, between 1969 and 1972, the men who walked the moon were transmogrified into low-gravity Cold Warriors. National heroes, in one view. Interplanetary...

The Trump administration is rapidly escalating its pressure campaign against Venezuela, with America’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, about to take up a position within striking...

Many college students in South Korea are enjoying downtime, relieved to wrap up midterm exams. But the nation’s elite universities have been left scrambling after it emerged that testing season was...

For better or worse, many people are asking artificial intelligence chatbots for health information and advice. According to a June 2024 poll from the health research group KFF, about 1 in 6 adults do...

The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said that the Pentagon had refused for weeks to share with Congress key information about its strikes on marine vessels that the...

Nasa wants ideas of how to speed up the return of its astronauts to the surface of the moon. And now, it has some. On Wednesday, the space companies owned by two of the richest people on Earth —...

Xiaofeng Wan, a former admissions officer at Amherst College, now works as a private consultant to international students who want to come to the United States. This week, as he held meetings in China...

The words “optimal” and “optimize” derive from the Latin “optimus,” or “best,” as in “make the best of things.” Alessio Figalli, a mathematician at the university ETH Zurich,...