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Diwali is the most important festival of the year in India — and for Hindus in particular. It is celebrated across faiths by more than a billion people in the world’s most populous nation and the diaspora. Over five days, people take part in festive gatherings, fireworks displays, feasts and prayer. Diwali is derived from the word “Deepavali,” which means “a row of lights.” Celebrants light rows of traditional clay oil lamps outside their homes to symbolize the victory of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. Diwali’s date is based on Hindu lunar calendarThe dates of the festival are…

In the South, there is only one thing that can rival college football itself: the party before kickoff.Pinpointing the exact origins of tailgating is near impossible. Some trace it to Nov. 6, 1869, when Rutgers and New Jersey (later Princeton) played in the first college football game. Others credit Green Bay Packers fans, who folded down pickup truck tailgates for makeshift pregame seating during the team’s inaugural season in 1919.Arguments over who has the best tailgating traditions are as old as the sport itself and the creativity is as varied as the fans themselves. From Bevo Boulevard (Texas) and the…

Long before Jessie Reyez was celebrated for her voice, poetry was the Toronto-bred musician’s “first love.” The Grammy-nominated and Juno Award winner’s music often feels like spoken poetry, backed by a mix of R&B, hip-hop and Latin beats. When music, and the commercial demands of the industry, fail to satiate her creative hunger, Reyez turns to writing and often asks her millions of Instagram followers for poetry prompts.She compiled some of those poems, previously only available on a 24-hour Instagram story timeline, into a book, “The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II,” releasing Tuesday. The exercise, which…

NEW YORK (AP) — Now here’s something you might not quite believe about Victoria Beckham, glam Spice Girl turned high-profile fashion designer: At theater school, they purposely put her in the back row. Because she was too heavy.“It was really difficult,” she says now of the memory from her youth, sipping a sparkling water in a Manhattan hotel in between work engagements. “We were all judged on how we looked. I was young. I had bad skin, my weight was going up and down, I had really lank hair.”Beckham was also bullied in school and told she was a bad…

The Fanjul family has been wooing politicians for decades, but their bet on the Trump administration is their best yet, after the president added tariffs for foreign competitors and pushed Coca-Cola to use its cane sugar to make American soda great again. To celebrate Donald Trump’s second inauguration earlier this year, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey came to Washington with an appropriate symbol of appreciation: a commemorative edition of the president’s favorite beverage, Diet Coke. But the meeting got a little tense when Trump asked why the company doesn’t use cane sugar in its signature soda—commonly referred to as “Mexican Coke”—and…

It might start with a cassette deck that streams Spotify and charges your phone. It doesn’t have to stop there. These days, yesterday is big business. A retro revival is underway in the design world: mushroom-shaped lamps, walnut stereo consoles, daisy dishware, neon Polaroid cameras. It’s like our homes just hustled over from “One Day at a Time” or “That ‘70s Show” or moonwalked in from “Thriller”-era 1982.Welcome to the retro reset, where ‘70s, ’80s and ‘90s aesthetics are getting a second life. It’s not just in fashion and film but in home décor and tech. Whether you actually lived…

ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “erotica for verified adults.”OpenAI won’t be the first to try to profit from sexualized AI. Sexual content was a top draw for AI tools almost as soon as the boom in AI-generated imagery and words erupted in 2022.But the companies that were early to embrace mature AI also encountered legal and societal minefields and harmful abuse as a growing number of people have turned to the technology for companionship or titillation. Will a sexier…

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — After drubbing El Salvador’s gangs during a more than three-year state of emergency, President Nayib Bukele turned his attention this month to another persistent, but softer, problem: his country’s many, many stray cats and dogs.“Thousands of dogs and cats live on our streets. We want to change that, but without cruelty. We have the financial resources, but we seek expert partners to make it a model for Latin America,” Bukele wrote on X on Oct. 8. “Who wants to come and help?”San Salvador struggles with a problem widely seen in cities across Latin America,…

Meta is adding parental controls for kids’ interactions with artificial intelligence chatbots — including the ability to turn off one-on-one chats with AI characters altogether — beginning early next year. But parents won’t be able to turn off Meta’s AI assistant, which Meta says will “will remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities, with default, age-appropriate protections in place to help keep teens safe.”Parents who don’t want to turn off all chats with all AI characters will also be able to block specific chatbots. And Meta said Friday that parents will be able to get “insights” about what…

TORSHAVN, Faroe Islands (AP) — The farmers’ market looked — let’s be honest — sad.Conditions aren’t friendly in the Faroe Islands for growing food. Raked by north Atlantic winds and nibbled by thousands of sheep, the nearly treeless islands have poor soil and little room for planting. Potatoes and rhubarb are local staples.But some residents have had enough of importing almost all their food from the rest of Europe and beyond. Many products are stamped with the flag of Denmark, under which the islands are self-governing.There are efforts to grow more adventurous crops like kale, seen as hardy elsewhere in…