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WhatsApp Says Russia Attempted to ‘Fully Block’ Service Months After Partial Ban

WhatsApp, the US-based instant messaging service, issued a statement on Thursday, claiming that the Russian government is attempting to "fully block" the app in the country. The company further added that with the ban, the government is driving Russian residents to use a state-owned platform, which WhatsApp is calling a "surveillance app". This comes months after a re...

Anthropic Reportedly Working on a Claude Cowork-Like Feature for iOS

Anthropic is reportedly working on a new feature for Claude’s mobile app. As per the report, the feature is dubbed Claude Tasks, and it is said to be focused on automation. The new feature is reportedly similar to Claude Cowork, the company’s automation tool for desktop. Tasks was reportedly spotted in the iOS version of the app, but it might also be developed for...

Honor X6d Launched With 50-Megapixel Camera, 5,260mAh Battery: Price, Features

Honor has launched the budget 5G Honor X6d quietly in the UAE. Similar to the Honor Play 60A, it features a 6.75-inch HD+ LCD display, MediaTek Dimensity 6300 chipset, 4GB RAM, and 256GB storage. It is priced at AED 509 (roughly Rs. 12,600) and comes in Midnight Black and Ocean Cyan. The phone has a 50-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel selfie camera, 5,260mAh battery...

Vivo V70, Vivo V70 Elite Price, Storage Configurations Tipped Ahead of India Launch

The Vivo V70 series is scheduled to be launched in India in February as the successor to the V60, which was introduced in 2025. Ahead of its anticipated debut, the pricing of the Vivo V70 and Vivo V70 Elite has been leaked, suggesting that the brand is targeting different price segments with the standard and Elite variants. The Vivo V70 is tipped to be offered in two ...

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine review – drag fabulousness in war-torn Beirut

Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

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