International News

Ukraine's Zelenskyy has a very bad week thanks to Trump and Putin. Here's why.

Feb. 14, 2025

Roman Baklazhov knows the pain, both physical and emotional, of watching as the Russian war machine seizes a home. The Ukrainian furniture maker says he was detained for 54 days with little explanation when Russian troops overran his city, Kherson, in the summer of 2022. Baklazhov, 43, says he was tortured with electricity, while next door to his squalid cell Russian troops laughed and drank as they listened to his screams.

Business

Apple and Google bring TikTok back to their U.S. app stores

Feb. 14, 2025

Apple and Google have made TikTok available on their U.S. app stores again, they said Thursday evening. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, disappeared from both stores in the United States on Jan. 18, hours before a ban on the social media app was set to go into effect. It had remained unavailable to download on both Apple's App Store and Google's Play store until Thursday. However, users who had previously downloaded it could continue to use it.

Business

As retailers drop DEI programs, Black founders could face obstacles to staying on shelves

Feb. 14, 2025

Fragrance brand Brown Girl Jane’s perfume bottles sit on shelves at Sephora near some of the most storied labels in the fashion and beauty world, including Prada and Dior. For the Black-owned brand, getting a retailer to bet on it was just the start, Brown Girl Jane CEO and co-founder Malaika Jones said. She said Sephora has supported the company so it can better compete with well-known brands with huge marketing budgets and glossy celebrity endorsements.

Business

Google AI chief tells employees company has 'all the ingredients' to hold AI lead over China's DeepSeek

Feb. 14, 2025

Google’s AI chief told employees that he’s not worried about China’s DeepSeek and said the search giant has superior artificial intelligence technology, according to audio of an all-hands meeting in Paris on Wednesday. At the meeting, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai read aloud a question about DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up lab that roiled U.S. markets recently, when its app shot to the top of the Apple’s App Store, supplanting ChatGPT. DeepSeek released a research paper last month claiming its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of other leading models.

Business

Retail sales slumped 0.9% in January, down much more than expected

Feb. 14, 2025

Consumers sharply curtailed their spending in January, indicating a potential weakening in economic growth ahead, according to a Commerce Department report Friday. Retail sales slipped 0.9% for the month from an upwardly revised 0.7% gain in December, even worse than the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% decline. The sales totals are adjusted for seasonality but not inflation for a month, in which prices rose 0.5%.

Business

The market continues to broaden out as investors ignore tariff and inflation threats

Feb. 14, 2025

It’s another day with more stocks up than down. The ratio Friday is almost 3:1, advancing stocks to declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s 2:1 on Nasdaq. You’d think with two huge overhangs to the market — Federal Reserve policy uncertainty and tariffs — stocks would be in difficult shape, but that’s not happening. Tech is lagging. You’d think that with the S&P 500 up 4% on the year, tech would again be the leader, but most of the best performing technology stocks last year are underperforming, with only Meta a strong standout.

Travel

Two strangers met on the Eiffel Tower 35 years ago. Here’s how they ended up married

Feb. 14, 2025

It wasn’t an obvious day to climb the Eiffel Tower. It was the end of November, 1989. Overcast and cold, with clouds obscuring the city.Anita Hansen, then in her early 20s, was studying French at college in Denmark. The university had arranged for Anita and her fellow students to spend a couple of days in Paris. It was definitely “not tourist season… dreary and cold and everything,” but Anita was unperturbed by the gray weather. She wanted to make the most of her time in Paris. “The time that we had off — I felt the need to go out and explore,” she tells CNN Travel today.

Travel

‘The Love Boat’: How a TV show transformed the cruise industry

Feb. 14, 2025

From steam-powered ships, to mega-liners, the cruise industry has been through quite a transformation over the years. And the market has skyrocketed. Back in 1970, an estimated 500,000 people went on a cruise holiday. That figure had jumped to five million by 1997. So what brought about this sudden surge in interest? According to industry experts, it was mainly down to a certain TV show with a catchy theme tune. “Come aboard, we’re expecting you!”

Entertainment

Movie Review: ‘Universal Language’ needs to be seen to be believed

Feb. 14, 2025

It’s not unusual for a city to double for another metropolis in movies. New Yorkers have long been able to spot when Toronto has been substituted for the Big Apple. Matthew Rankin, though, has gone more than a step, or maybe 85 steps, further. His “Universal Language” takes place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the culture is entirely Iranian. Farsi is the spoken tongue. At Tim Hortons, tea is served from samovars. It’s as if we’ve been knocked over the head and woken up in some snowy, Canadian version of an Abbas Kiarostami film. And in Rankin’s surreal and enchantingly discombobulating film, that’s more or less the case. No reason is ever stated for the strange, deadpan fusion of Winnipeg reality and Iranian New Wave cinema. But there’s that title. If cinema is a universal language, it’s never been more elastically employed, bridging worlds 6,000 miles apart for a singular kind of movie dream, like what Rankin might have spun in his head while drifting off to sleep on a Manitoba winter night while Kiarostami’s “Where Is the Friend’s House?” played on TV.

Entertainment

Movie Review: ‘The Gorge’ is ridiculous

Feb. 14, 2025

In the movies, we’ve had green valleys, haunted hills and grand canyons. But only now has the time arrived for a long-overshadowed land formation. “The Gorge,” a preposterous new videogame-like thriller, at least succeeds in, um, gorging on this often-overlooked geological feature. The gorge in question, to be fair, is a beauty. In some northern forested wilderness sit two concrete towers, one for each side of a wide, foggy ravine encircled by sheer rock steeps. Two expert snipers – Levi ( Miles Teller ) from the U.S., and Drasa ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), placed by Russia — have been dropped off to man their respective stations. Both are conscripts of a sort. Levi has been a private contractor for the military since being psychologically deemed unfit for service by the Marines. ( Sigourney Weaver plays the cryptic woman who hires him.) Drasa is Lithuanian. Each operates in the murky quasi-official world of covert military operations. All they know is that they’re to be at this ultra-classified post for a year, part of an annual rotation. Their main job is to shoot anything that comes out of the chasm below.