The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. Google's AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised'white saviour' visuals Nano Banana Pro, Google's new AI-powered image generator, has been accused of creating racialised and "white saviour" visuals in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa - and sometimes appends the logos of large charities. Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt "volunteer helps children in Africa" yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background. In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Worldwide Vision", and with the UK charity World Vision's logo.

Several legal experts have told BBC Verify that the second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat by the US military was probably illegal, and would likely be considered an extrajudicial killing under international law. On Monday, the Trump administration confirmed that a follow-up strike on the boat - which has been criticised as a double tap - was ordered by US Navy Admiral Frank Bradley with the overall operation having been authorised by War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Nine people died in the first strike on the vessel and two survivors were left clinging to the burning wreckage when it was struck again, killing them, according to the Washington Post. A US official has said four missiles were used in the operation. The Trump administration has not denied there were survivors and has insisted the strikes on 2 September were in accordance with the law of armed conflict.

Spain and The Netherlands will boycott next year's Eurovision Song Contest, after Israel was allowed to compete. They were among a number of countries who had called for Israel to be excluded over the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, and accusations of unfair voting practices. Despite calls for a vote on Israel's participation, members instead approved a new set of rules intended to protect the integrity of the contest. In a statement, Dutch broadcaster Avrotros said that participation under the current circumstances is incompatible with the public values that are essential to us. Spanish broadcaster RTVE added: The board of directors of RTVE agreed last September that Spain would withdraw from Eurovision if Israel was part of it.

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More than just rats and fleas added to the'perfect storm' plague. Photograph of the fresco Trionfo della Morte, taken at its original location in the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa. The fresco, known as the "Triumph of Death" and attributed to the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, is not precisely dated; scholarly estimates range from 1335 to 1350. While it does not depict the Black Death explicitly, the selected detail shows victims of an epidemic from diverse social backgrounds, their souls carried off by demons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

Pots, quadrants, confederation constraints, group position grids... the 2026 World Cup finals draw on Friday is not going to be a straightforward affair. There's a lot to unpack so we're going to explain it as simply as we can. Luckily, Fifa will have a computer to do most of the heavy lifting and make sure everything runs smoothly. Though as Uefa found out in 2021, sometimes technology does go wrong. Let's hope there will be no gremlins in Washington once the draw ceremony kicks off.

What is a Palestinian without olives? In Gaza, the world has seen the cost of a diplomacy that claims to uphold a rules-based order but applies it selectively. The United States intervened late, and only to defend an occupation the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled illegal. Alongside other Western nations that built multilateral institutions, the US increasingly pursues nationalist agendas that undermine them. The hypocrisy is stark: one set of rules for Ukraine, another for Gaza.

Police accused of'homophobic assumptions' over victims of blackmail on Grindr Police failed to properly investigate allegations that a gang was blackmailing men on the gay dating app Grindr, the BBC can reveal. Our investigation has learned of five cases of suspected blackmail involving victims targeted on Grindr in one area, with at least four of them connected to the same gang, which remains at large. In one instance, a suspected victim killed himself 24 hours after a group of men turned up at his home demanding he hand over his new Range Rover. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog has told Hertfordshire Police - the investigating force - to examine whether homophobic assumptions could have contributed to failures in the investigation. Hertfordshire Police said it was unable to discuss specific points about the case, which has now been reopened, but said it is committed to building and maintaining good working relationships with the LGBTQ+ communities.

Facial recognition technology could be used more often by UK police forces, according to new plans announced by the Home Office. Policing and crime minister Sarah Jones said a widespread rollout of the equipment could mark the biggest breakthrough in catching criminals since DNA matching. People are being asked for their views on its use, as part of a 10-week consultation launched on Thursday, possibly paving the way for new laws. Jones credited the technology for helping to arrest thousands of criminals, but campaign group Big Brother Watch said increased use would make George Orwell roll in his grave. Facial recognition is used to locate wanted suspects and find vulnerable people.

A major effort in modern high-dimensional statistics has been devoted to the analysis of linear predictors trained on nonlinear feature embeddings via empirical risk minimization (ERM). Gaussian equivalence theory (GET) has emerged as a powerful universality principle in this context: it states that the behavior of high-dimensional, complex features can be captured by Gaussian surrogates, which are more amenable to analysis. Despite its remarkable successes, numerical experiments show that this equivalence can fail even for simple embeddings -- such as polynomial maps -- under general scaling regimes. We investigate this breakdown in the setting of random feature (RF) models in the quadratic scaling regime, where both the number of features and the sample size grow quadratically with the data dimension. We show that when the target function depends on a low-dimensional projection of the data, such as generalized linear models, GET yields incorrect predictions. To capture the correct asymptotics, we introduce a Conditional Gaussian Equivalent (CGE) model, which can be viewed as appending a low-dimensional non-Gaussian component to an otherwise high-dimensional Gaussian model. This hybrid model retains the tractability of the Gaussian framework and accurately describes RF models in the quadratic scaling regime. We derive sharp asymptotics for the training and test errors in this setting, which continue to agree with numerical simulations even when GET fails. Our analysis combines general results on CLT for Wiener chaos expansions and a careful two-phase Lindeberg swapping argument. Beyond RF models and quadratic scaling, our work hints at a rich landscape of universality phenomena in high-dimensional ERM.